News Sites Slammed By Michael Jackson Traffic

miller60 writes "Major news sites struggled to remain online yesterday evening as news of Michael Jackson's death triggered huge waves of Internet traffic. TMZ.com broke the news and was quickly overwhelmed, while Twitter turned off features to handle its load. They weren't alone. Keynote Systems reports that ABC, AOL, CBS, CNN Money, MSNBC, NBC, and Yahoo! News all experienced performance problems between 6:15 and 9 pm Eastern time, when the average availability of news sites tracked by Keynote dropped from almost 100% to 86%. The cloud computing crowd immediately jumped on the traffic jams to argue their case. 'Not have a cloud bursting strategy in the age of cloud computing isn't just wrong — it's idiotic,' wrote one cloud blogger."

Comments

sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

gangsta!!!

Re:sweet

[SharpFang]

No! Not "Sweet Gangsta".
"Smooth Criminal".

Not only news

[Froggie]

http://www.sickipedia.org/'s been out all day too...

Re:Not only news

[brad3378]

It's a shame that they were not ready for the extra traffic because they could have cashed in by selling a lot of advertising.
All the major TV networks are cashing in later tonight with their own special presentations.

Now if only they had the ability to make this much money off of living people....

Re:Not only news

[Froggie]

I have a sudden image of QVC flogging off a bloke's organs. Clearly I don't need Sickipedia.

Re:Not only news

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you you're forgetting about a doped up Britney Spears shaving her own head...

Re:Not only news

[Anonymous Coward]

Showing off her pussy is much more interesting, but that's just me...

Re:Not only news

[MightyMartian]

Michael Jackson has been a good source of revenue for the press for a quarter of a century. Every few years, he'd reappear, acting even more insane, and thus getting more attention on CNN and in papers from the National Enquirer all the way up to the New York Times. The real pity is that the guy couldn't share in this bit of wealth he was building, and instead apparently died $400 million dollars in debt.

Re:Not only news

[cayenne8]

"The real pity is that the guy couldn't share in this bit of wealth he was building, and instead apparently died $400 million dollars in debt."

Wow, that's the way I'd like to go...owing about $400 million.

That means you could afford a pretty good life up until then...and when you're gone, what do you care?

Re:Not only news

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you think that debt just vanishes when you die? The debt owners will end up going after his estate and anyone tied to it, including his family.

Re:Not only news

[cayenne8]

"Do you think that debt just vanishes when you die? The debt owners will end up going after his estate and anyone tied to it, including his family."

Your family is not responsible for your debts.

If my parents died and left behind $100million in debt.....I'd certainly not be liable for any of it.

"cloud blogger"?

[siddesu]

shouldn't that mighty concept get its own word, like "clogger" or something?

Re:"cloud blogger"?

[Sebilrazen]

shouldn't that mighty concept get its own word, like "clogger" or something?

I believe "cloggers" are tap dancers and the name is derived from the wooden shoes from Netherlands.

(Sadly, I didn't need to google it, that's the kruft I can't rid myself of.)

Re:"cloud blogger"?

[Dunbal]

I believe "cloggers" are tap dancers and the name is derived from the wooden shoes from Netherlands.

      You obviously never had a job cleaning toilets in a public place when you were a teenager.

Re:"cloud blogger"?

[CXI]

"Four-hundred years ago, on the planet Earth, workers who felt their livelihood threatened by automation, flung their wooden shoes, called sabo, into the machines to stop them . . . hence the word: sabotage."

Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

Re:"cloud blogger"?

[Yvan256]

So what you're suggesting is... cloudbloggage?

Re:"cloud blogger"?

[Anonymous Coward]

called sabo,

It's actually written "sabot".

AC

Re:"cloud blogger"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just be glad that it isn't 'hyper' anymore.

Re:"cloud blogger"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure you don't mean clubbers are lap dancers and the name is derived from the red light shops in the Netherlands?
      You obviously never had a job cleaning bedrooms in a cathouse when you were a teenager.

Last.FM was hit hard

[Renderer of Evil]

According to this graph.

Re:Last.FM was hit hard

[v1]

love that graph. incredible spike last night, tapering off (some) into 4am, and then right back up and over yesterday's high, and still climbing.

Wonder when it will return to normal? I bet we see this for a week.

Re:Last.FM was hit hard

[Anonymous Coward]

Just goes to show how unpopular he was _before_ he died.
First Steve Irwin, now Wacko Jacko? I'm sure there's others.

Re:Last.FM was hit hard

[harry666t]

I wonder how these events affected the output of a few random number generators.

Wikipedia article

[Tragedy4u]

The Michael Jackson Wikipedia article was inaccessible for several hours yesterday too.

Re:Wikipedia article

[mcgrew]

A hundred thousand people all trying to update it at once...

Re:Wikipedia article

[grub]

The Michael Jackson Wikipedia article was inaccessible for several hours yesterday too.

There was an editing war going on because they couldn't agree on which to use: "pedophile" or "paedophile"

.

Re:Wikipedia article

[againjj]

And with mistakes too. I tried to correct it, but couldn't get Wikipedia to respond fast enough to make it possible for me. I checked a couple hours later though, and it had been fixed up by then.

Re:Wikipedia article

[Douglas Simmons]

grub with the rimshot. nice.

Re:Michael who?

[GGardner]

Michael Jackson, great guy, wrote books about beer, died a couple of years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson_(writer)

Poll results

[suso]

Right now the results of the /. poll are showing the majority of votes as him being forgettable. Obviously the current young generation has no idea the impact MJ had on the world. Perhaps in time they will learn.

Re:Poll results

[tomhudson]

"Right now the results of the /. poll are showing the majority of votes as him being forgettable. Obviously the current young generation has no idea the impact MJ had on the world. Perhaps in time they will learn."

Riiight - Michael Jackson - the same guy who added a whole new meaning to "Think of the children!" Next up: a new Fox DocuDrama/Horror Flick: "Michael Jackson Unmasked!"

Re:Poll results

[Anonymous Coward]

Your wrong! The newer generations are the ones where he had more impact gigigigi awwwwwright

Re:Poll results

[morgan_greywolf]

Obviously the current young generation has no idea the impact MJ had on the world.

Like what? The Moonwalk? Popularizing the wearing of a single white sequined glove and red multi-zippered leather jackets? A resurgence in the popularity of Vincent Price? Making Quincy Jones even more richer and more obnoxious than he already was? Giving Eddie Van Halen bragging rights for the one of the longest running #1 songs ever?

Re:Poll results

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it doesn't necessarily mean that they actually do find him "forgettable", it's just that that adjective happened to be coupled with the only option for "Michael Jackson's death did not affect me".

He may have changed the world, but that was a long time ago, so his death means nothing now. I personally find it impossible to care, on an emotional level, about people I have never met. In fact, I don't really care about my friends or family, either.

I am a sociopath.

Re:Poll results

[Rockoon]

How about having the biggest selling album ever? Its been several decades now and nobody else has come close. Thats how big of an impact MJ had.

It was only later that the pedophilia stuff cropped up.. but by then he was already a legend ranking right up there will Elvis, and if it werent for the pedophelia stuff his funeral would be as big as JFK's or John Lennon's (thats assuming it wont be, but it may very well actualy be)

A freakish monster obsessed with surgical modifcations? Yep. Caught in several pedophelia scandals? Yep. One of the biggest musicians ever? Also true.

Re:Poll results

[Xest]

Er, I'm of the "Michael Jackson" generation, except to me he's still forgettable when he's not in the media because of a child molestation case or for dangling a baby over a balcony or for managing to blow hundreds of millions of dollars mostly on tat.

Age has nothing to do with it, it's just whilst all the pop fans were listening to Jacko the rest of us were listening to things like Guns and Roses.

To many of us, the only reason Jacko wasn't forgettable was the fact he was always getting himself in the media by doing something pretty stupid.

I think you'll find it's your assumption that just because you seem to like Michael Jackson that he must universally be liked that's wrong. Not everyone has the same tastes.

If I had to pick some favourite tracks from the 80s then stuff by U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns and Roses, Bon Jovi would come well ahead of anything by Michael Jackson. They're slightly different genres, but frankly if I had to pick something cheesy which is the category I'd personally put Jacko's songs into I'd probably even choose something more catchy and recognisable such as A-ha's "Take on me".

You're welcome to like Jacko, but don't assume everyone else does and assume that if they don't they're from the wrong generation. I distinctly remember even at the time friends were pretty split about him - sure some loved him, but there were still plenty that hated him even when he was in his prime.

Re:Poll results

[itsthebin]

yeah - "he touched a lot of people"

Re:Poll results

[rubycodez]

good grief, by any serious consideration of musical talent he was nothing special, made no new contribution to the arts. Hype and marketing success story, sure. But being almost the same age as MJ I can tell you neither I nor any of my friends growing up cared for his music, especially as he spent half his life being a weirdo.

Re:Poll results

[AlecC]

And to those of us not interested in the music industry, the biggest selling album ever is also supremely uninteresting. He may have had a huge effect on the music industry, but he didn't have much effect on the rest of the world - which amounts to quite a lot.

Re:Poll results

[vertinox]

How about having the biggest selling album ever?

And this improves our lives how?

Some people have the record for growing the world's biggest pumpkin, but I'm more concerned with people working on solutions to stop world hunger and cure cancer.

Re:Poll results

[morgan_greywolf]

One of the biggest musicians ever? Also true.

Perhaps that's more of a commentary on just how terrible the music industry has gotten since the Beatles released the White Album (the previous biggest selling album ever) than any actual impact Michael Jackson had on the world. Then again, I guess you or the previous poster ever actually he had a positive impact, did you? ;)

Re:Poll results

[noahisaac]

He may have had a huge effect on the music industry, but he didn't have much effect on the rest of the world - which amounts to quite a lot.

No, in fact he had a huge effect on the rest of the world. Even though his popularity had waned somewhat in the US, he was still enormously popular in Japan and many other places.

Re:Poll results

[Anonymous Coward]

No you are just broken.
I care about people, it's called empathy. It should be installed by default.

Re:Poll results

[Sponge Bath]

...always getting himself in the media by doing something pretty stupid

His hair catching on fire was a classic. He was an entertainer to the end.

Re:Poll results

[tehcyder]

How about having the biggest selling album ever?

Well, the Da Vinci Code is one of the best selling books of recent times, but that doesn't mean that Dan Browne is an important writer.

Re:Poll results

[pedestrian crossing]

It should be installed by default.

Or you could just aptitude install empathy, it's really not that big of a deal. The base install is bloated enough as is...

Re:Poll results

[AlecC]

For what, other than his music? By which I include concerts as well as recordings, of course. He was, indeed, huge in worldwide music. But if he had not lived, how would the world be different other than in recording sold and concerts played? What effect did he have on politics, economics, the environment, diplomacy, transport, health...?

Re:Poll results

[pbhj]

good grief, by any serious consideration of musical talent he was nothing special, made no new contribution to the arts. Hype and marketing success story, sure. But being almost the same age as MJ I can tell you neither I nor any of my friends growing up cared for his music, especially as he spent half his life being a weirdo.

I don't own any Michael Jackson music, nor have I ever been to any of his concerts, etc..

He may not have had any serious musical talent (which pop stars do?), I suspect he did within his genre, but you can't deny that he was an exceptional performer. Perhaps he was just the canvas on which many people painted a performance, however, he was central to that. Perhaps you don't like that style but you've got to appreciate the fact that he's one of the highest selling artistes ever and entertained on stage over about 40 years. That's an achievement.

I'd also think he made substantial contributions to the arts in his performance of some quite novel choreographic sequences- who'd done a zombie dance before thriller!? Who'd seen moonwalking before MJ popularised it.

Re:Poll results

[Sir_Lewk]

Oh screw off, culture and the arts are an important part of defining "who we are" as a race. Without our movies, music, paintings and books we would completely loose our sense of who we are, and where we've been. (books in particular, do you really think the world would not be negatively effected if all of the classics simply ceased to exist over night?)

Re:Poll results

[garcia]

You're welcome to like Jacko, but don't assume everyone else does and assume that if they don't they're from the wrong generation. I distinctly remember even at the time friends were pretty split about him - sure some loved him, but there were still plenty that hated him even when he was in his prime.

I hated what the idiot did in the public eye (just like plenty of the rockers and their friends that you mention) but I must admit that I loved his older stuff (especially from the Jackson 5) and it would appear that plenty of others did too.

Re:Poll results

[noahisaac]

What effect did he have on politics, economics, the environment, diplomacy, transport, health...?

Why, no appreciable effect at all, but are any of these things more or less important than his cultural/musical impact? Are politics more important than music?

Re:Poll results

[Anonymous Coward]

That young generation is who suffered the "in"pact of Michael Jackson. Think of the children will you? He sure did.....

Re:Poll results

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, welcome our new humorless moderator overlords.

Re:Poll results

[Draek]

Its not about liking him, its about recognizing the huge influence he had over contemporary and later musicians. Its much like Nirvana, I may personally hate their music (and that statement alone would've been enough to send my karma into the fiery pits of hell, had Slashdot a younger population), but even to me the influence they've had over pretty much anything that calls itself "rock" these days is undeniable. Michael Jackson represented the same thing for pop, so regardless of whether you liked him or not he most certainly wasn't "forgettable".

Re:Poll results

[baap]

Im sorry but this sort of cynicism deserves to be slammed. You being from the Michael Jackson generation and saying that he was mostly hated is not a worthy thing to say to one of the few American entertainers that constituted the ubiquitous symbol of emancipation your country represented to the rest of the world during some pretty hard times. This is a man whose name and music was recognized and appreciated from the somalian pirates to the pashtuns carting RPGs to the Taliban. No im not saying he was the preferred musician for terrorists, the world over but that he provided common ground for the whole world to sing/dance and express themselves. Your limited perception of his phenomenon is testament to the isolation you are in and a refusal to participate in mourning this musical genius. I equate you to the Paparazzi of the Beethoven generation. thanks /\ \/

Re:Poll results

[AlecC]

The original discussion was whether he had a great effect on "the world", and his creation of the best selling record ever was quoted as an example. I just commented that this didn't affect those not interested in the music industry. It is not that the music industry is more or less important than all those other things, but that the music industry is not "the world" and all those other things exist. Jacksons death affects only the music industry, and not (as was said several posts up) the whole world. Which is not to denigrate the music industry, but it is to say that other things exist.

Re:Poll results

[sleigher]

He had a big impact on pop music. He never really branched beyond pop and showed any real depth in terms of music and for that he is only a pop star. Sure he sold a lot of records in the 80's and that's great. But he didn't make any great contributions to music in general. Or the arts or anything really. He did open up the music video thing to a wider audience but again that still really lives in the world of pop. Selling lots of records does not a great artist make. A popular one certainly but there is WAY more to music and the arts than pop music.

I feel bad for hose who loved him and are suffering the loss. But that is a personal loss. The greater world of music is not really losing that much. The music industry might be but so what.

Re:Poll results

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, so we can live longer, for what? It's not one or the other, you know?

Re:Poll results

[Anonymous Coward]

Total ignorance. MJ raised more money for ending poverty than anyone in history.

Re:Poll results

[Hatta]

Michael Jackson on one hand, Guns 'n Roses on the other. No wonder I never liked music as a kid. The 80's were a fucking wasteland. The Talking Heads are the only band from the decade I like, and I didn't discover them until adulthood.

Of course, Junta and Pretty Hate Machine were both released in 1989 so it wasn't *all* bad.

Re:Poll results

[teknopurge]

Michael sold 750+ million albums. You can take your T-Pain/Solja Boy/Milley Cirrus and get bent.

Re:Poll results

[Anonymous Coward]

It's fair to say that since it's the biggest selling album ever, odds are it has directly shaped many of today's performers.

See if you can try to figure out where I'm going with this.

Re:Poll results

[phantomcircuit]

Oh screw off, culture and the arts are an important part of defining "who we are" as a race. Without our movies, music, paintings and books we would completely loose our sense of who we are, and where we've been. (books in particular, do you really think the world would not be negatively effected if all of the classics simply ceased to exist over night?)

Maybe all those classics majors would get out there and ya know... do something useful?

Re:Poll results

[Anonymous Coward]

[citation needed]

Re:Poll results

[FatAlb3rt]

Did you even RTFSummary? News sites were slammed, but you suggest that he didn't have much effect on the world outside the music industry. Does not compute.

Re:Poll results

[flyneye]

"How about having the biggest selling album ever? Its been several decades now and nobody else has come close."

          This proves only that most people are idiots and will listen to and admire anything they're told is good. The music industry outs way more idiots than talent. The reason Jackoff was popular is that he was cooperative with production and easy to market with a built in brand name. No talent required. None seen.

Re:Poll results

[Xest]

Er, I'm British, I'm not sure why you'd assume I'm American.

Manchester United (British football team) are also prominent world wide including places ranging from Somalia to China to Pallestine, but it doesn't mean they really are that important in the grant scheme of things.

You can say what you want about my opinion of Michael Jackson but do not forget there are still hundreds of millions out there who agree with me.

It is stupid to pretend everyone liked him. Yes he had a massive following but it is not universal, it's naive to think that would ever be the case when we're talking about something as subjective as music.

Re:Poll results

[mcgrew]

I always hated his creepy, bland, forgettable music, and don't much like kiddy fiddlers. What other poll option could I possibly use?

Re:Poll results

[AlecC]

Poster suso was talking about Jacksons lifetime effect, not a short lived server hit. "Obviously the current young generation has no idea the impact MJ had on the world.". A transient peak on news servers is not a zero effect on the comic scale, but is it hardly history making.

Re:Poll results

[mcgrew]

I would imagine that anyone who actually lived when Jackson was popular picked the same option (I did).

Re:Poll results

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because clearly MJ as being culturally important.

It comes down to taste. I'm sure historically, due to his popularity he will be considered important to a degree. However, in my personal opinion, MJ did little to advance music during his time as a musician.

He wrote popular songs in a style definitive of the time. He was a very good dancer. These things make him a great performer, a great musician, an entertainer-- but not particularly culturally relevant.

For example, I love Pavarotti, Frank Sinatra, Metallica, whatever, but I do not think that they will become culturally relevant peices of history.

A performaer can be amazing and remain culturally irrelevant by failing to be progressive. I admit that there are probably a few that could be considered relevant by the beauty and talent of their performances alone, but I do not feel MJ comes even close to this case.

Re:Poll results

[Tanktalus]

How 'bout some empathy for the children he conned into sex acts?

Proof or retract.

How 'bout some disgust for the jaded rich who don't see anyone else as valid and care only for their own pleasure?

I see MJ completely differently. Thrown into the spotlight at 5 years old, he pretty much stopped maturing at that point. His fame (and, later, infamy) and riches meant that he always had "handlers" around to take care of things for him. Without having to do things for himself, he could never mature. He wasn't jaded rich. He was immature rich, and probably not by his own doing.

How 'bout some joy that children are safer by one pedophile now?

Assuming he was one. I kind of doubt it.

How 'bout the realization that singing meaningless crap in a falsetto while dancing self indulgently isn't talent no matter what the industry tells you?

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Based on the sales of said meaningless crap, I'd have to conclude that you're wrong. I just happen to (mostly) agree with you. (Not all of it was meaningless, but I digress - I'm not sure what he wrote vs merely sang/performed.)

Re:Poll results

[lanswitch]

He had an enormous impact. The guitar solo in 'Beat it' introduced a lot of people to Van Halen...

Re:Poll results

[Attila Dimedici]

If you are comparing Michael Jackson to Guns & Roses, you are not from his generation. I never liked his music (OK, some of the Jackson 5 stuff), but he was a tremendous talent. Those of the "Michael Jackson Generation" might prefer Aerosmith (first album 1972 to MJ's first solo album in 1971), but Guns & Roses (first album 1985) is a later generation. While MJ was still making music when Guns & Roses came along, so was Aerosmith.

Re:Poll results

[Loki_1929]

And thus we see the true colors of our society. So long as you can sing, dance, and entertain the world, molesting children and then paying off their parents to make criminal cases go away is just fine with us. You can even come right out and proclaim in televised interviews that you're carrying on inappropriate relationships with children; we'll still either deny or ignore it.

I see all this outpouring of sympathy all over the web for a pedophile who molested children with impunity for years on end and all I can think is that all those Catholic priests should have taken some classes at an art school before doing what they did as it probably would have saved the church some money. I don't care how well you sing or dance. I don't care if you cure Cancer. The moment you start molesting children, society should throw you to the wolves.

Re:Poll results

[Anonymous Coward]

While I'm also a fan of Guns and Roses and never was a fan of Jacko I do somewhat feel bad for him. I never realized the abuse he suffered as a child and somewhat can understand why he turned out the way he did.

Re:Poll results

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it brings entertainment and fun, which generates happiness. The ultimate point of being alive is to be happy.

Re:Poll results

[The End Of Days]

He may not have had any serious musical talent

Let's be honest here, the man could definitely sing. That falls within the definition of musical talent whether or not you liked his music.

Re:Poll results

[Rockoon]

'of recent times' is a little different than 'of all time'

Re:Poll results

[Reverberant]

he didn't have much effect on the rest of the world - which amounts to quite a lot.

Ahem, ahem.

Re:Poll results

[Rockoon]

I formally charge you with pedophilia. You have done so with impunity for years on end. You should be thrown to the wolves.

Certainly the accusation is there in the case of Michael Jackson, but he remained unconvicted, just like you.

Re:Poll results

[jo42]

And I am very happy to say that I never bought a single one of them or listened to his 'music' by choice.

Re:Poll results

[RedK]

I think a better question would be who's been Moonwalking after MJ popularized it. Face it, aside from the quick joke at a trophy ceremony, the Moonwalk is best left in the past, forgotten by all.

Re:Poll results

[Frosty Piss]

According to this: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/0625091jackson1.html he masturbated the young man to climax.

Re:Poll results

[Rockoon]

Even though the culture that Sinatra defined is more or less dead, that does not make him culturally irrelevant. He and the rat pack are still the symbol of that culture regardless of its continued existance.

Its Frank freaking Sinatra for christ sakes.
Its Elvis freaking Presley for christ sakes.
Its John freaking Lennon for christ sakes.
Its Michael freaking Jackson for christ sakes.

These guys are not footnotes. They are Legends. Michael Jackson sold out 50 concerts in just a few hours when sales opened up in March of this year.. ONE MILLION TICKETS. According to ticketmaster after selling out so quickly, the demand for those tickets was "unprecedented." Michael Jackson is as huge as Elvis regardless of how any of us feel about his music or his lifestyle.

Re:Poll results

[MightyMartian]

He could sing, he could dance, he was a damned good writer of pop songs (let me just say I'm not a big fan of pop music in general, and I was no Jackson fan). People seem to forget that some of the big hits, in particular Billie Jean (which is probably up there with She Loves You and Good Vibrations as being one of the most of the successful and influential pop songs) were songs he wrote.

The story of Billie Jean is actually kind of interesting. It was his breakout hit that pretty much defined him as an international pop star, as opposed to a Motown star or black star. It was a musically sophisticated song with some pretty weird lyrics. Quincy Jones didn't even want to release the song, and he and Jackson nearly fell out over it, and yet Jackson, before he became the next Howard Hughes, was a damned savvy operator who knew even better than Jones that this was going to be THE song, and it does, whether we like it, pretty much define pop music in the early 1980s.

In general, his achievement with Thriller really does put him up there with Elvis, the Beatles, Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac as one of the most successful recording artists of all time. Thriller has moved over a hundred million units. It's a staggering number.

Re:Poll results

[tnk1]

I'm not sure what you are getting at. Did Elvis have a big political or economic effect either? No. He was the King, and that was all that he ever needed to be in order to affect the world.

Having a legacy isn't a college entrance application. Being "well-rounded" is not a requirement to affect the world. I could care less about "the Music Industry" myself, but I've certainly heard his music despite that. It is possible for people to be so good at what they do that they transcend their origin point in society.

Look at Bill Gates. He's a computer nerd, but he's also a fabulously wealthy computer nerd whose operating system is running on most PC's today. Now he's a philanthropist, but do we really think that he wouldn't have gone down in history if he had never been something other than Chairman of Microsoft?

John Lennon and many of the performers of the same ilk may be out to stop all wars or cure AIDs or whatever, but let's be honest, would we give a shit about them if they weren't the performers that they are/were? In fact, if we are really being honest, what do most of these performers do in these other spheres that makes any difference other than adding publicity to things? Their effect on the world is already there *before* they got involved. There are a few performers who are really knowledgeable about what they are doing, and probably deserve great fame for these other works as well, but that's the exception, not the rule.

Re:Poll results

[flyneye]

No retraction. He merely bought off the civil cases. Any moron knows what happened,let alone wise men.
          I'm sure you see him through rose colored glasses. Take them off. He's an ugly little troll.
          Based on sales of meaningless crap indeed. The music industry only ONLY calls an act talent if they have the talent to market said act. The rest is advertising hyperbole. The general public likes anything it's told to for the convenience of the industry to market it. No talent required, none seen. There was a time you could put on an organ grinder monkey suit, shrill falsetto, dance self indulgently and the industry had someone who could market that.That spells sales. Sales based on a talented marketing division not a monkey.
          No matter how much you polish it a turd is a turd. Market it correctly and the public will have a popular new exciting taste sensation. You've been had. Go brush the crap off your teeth.
God, I'll bet you think he actually had something to do with writing any of the songs he recorded.
The man was so socially retarded he could barely do anything towards personal care that you or I do ourselves everyday. Don't expect he made any relevant career decisions on his own. He was a brand name and that's all. He was used by others as a cash cow and built his own wealth that way.
If not for that he would probably be just another citizen doing prison time for molestation.
       

Re:Poll results

[yo_tuco]

"Michael sold 750+ million albums."

Probably 75% of the sales go to teenage girls who love overdubbed, synthesized music and guys who look like girls.

Re:Poll results

[zmollusc]

Meh, I have been bored by Michael Jackson's lame music and antics since the mid seventies. You don't have to be part of the 'current young generation' to dislike him.

Re:Poll results

[brkello]

You say this, yet are incapable of spelling the word "lose" correctly. If only MJ wrote a song about the difference between loose and lose...the world would be a better place. Now, we can only wonder.

Re:Poll results

[Xest]

Well, most people talk about stuff like Thriller, Smooth Criminal, Billie Jean etc.

It wasn't until the mid 80s that Jackson really peaked which is around the same time that GnR came about which is why the comparison. The earlier stuff wasn't anywhere near as popular and most Jackson fans almost certainly didn't become so until the mid 80s, that's probably why the 80s are commonly referred to as being the period that defines the Jackson generation because it was the period that really defined his career.

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[brkello]

I grew up in the 80s and find him forgettable as well. It isn't like I disliked his music. It is just that he didn't have much of an impact on me. I can appreciate the things he accomplished in his life time. I can also see how that was tarnished by some of his personality flaws.

But the GP was just stating that you can't expect people to like someone just because you do. If he was a good person throughout his life, I imagine I would be more sad. But he molested children...something that he spent a lot of money and time on to protect. I can't divorce that reality from the talent side and it just makes me not really care that he has passed. Just like Kobe Bryant. He may be a good at basketball, but I will always see a rapist and a cheater and root against him. His legacy is tarnished by that and will be forgettable to me as well.

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[HungWeiLo]

I would dispute that. From America's standpoint, people like Michael Jackson was what represented America in the 80's. Others in that vein include probably Sylvester Stallone and Madonna.

Even the 85-year-old Quechua grandmother I met in a small Hamlet in the Andes knew who Michael Jackson was.

Even had he not done anything to affect the world (but he has - countless charitable acts and donations), his image will long be instilled in the minds of many around the world as a representation of 80s America (and for once, it's mostly positive image).

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[Anonymous Coward]

"In general, his achievement with Thriller really does put him up there with Elvis..."

An example of music made by sound Engineers. Yeah, he took overdubbing to the next level. Not very impressive in my book.

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[RubberDuckie]

How 'bout some empathy for the children he conned into sex acts?

Proof or retract.

I ran across a MJ special last night while channel surfing on, I think, NBC. At any rate, they had a bit on about his molestation trial in 2005. Although he was acquitted, two of the jurors who had originally defended the verdict came back and said they thought he was guilty. If nothing else, there's a lot of 'smoke' around MJ.

I see MJ completely differently. Thrown into the spotlight at 5 years old, he pretty much stopped maturing at that point. His fame (and, later, infamy) and riches meant that he always had "handlers" around to take care of things for him. Without having to do things for himself, he could never mature. He wasn't jaded rich. He was immature rich, and probably not by his own doing.

Yep, he had a very different life from most people. It would be hard to be a 'normal' person growing up in his shoes. On the other hand he did have the power to try to change his behaviour, and from my limited view on his life he didn't seem to try to do that. It seemed he tried to play up his odd behaviour. I suppose that keeps him in the lime light, and there's no such thing as bad publicity in the entertainment industry.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Loki1929 you sick SOB, I remember you wanting to show me all your child porn while you made your little cousin masterbate blindfolded.

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[Anonymous Coward]

and your opinion will mean even less 75 years from now when no one will remember who you were or anything you did and still, once in a while, one of his tracks comes across the waves... your small-mindedness is astounding

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[not-my-real-name]

You're welcome to like Jacko, but don't assume everyone else does and assume that if they don't they're from the wrong generation. I distinctly remember even at the time friends were pretty split about him - sure some loved him, but there were still plenty that hated him even when he was in his prime.

I was never particularly fond of his music, but judging from all the attention, I have to assume that a lot of other people were.

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[Loki_1929]

Multiple accusations followed by multiple payouts and a televised admission from a grown man that he shares his bed with young boys.

You don't pay out $20 Million in hush money to just one family (in addition to all the others paid off) unless there's something to hush.

And another thing, this isn't about pedophilia. I don't care what's in someone's head; I care about what they do. If Michael Jackson were just a pedophile who never acted on his impulses, then good for him for overcoming biological screwups to maintain human decency. But regardless of what was going through his head, it's pretty damned obvious what he was up to with those boys. We can debate all day about the extent of his inappropriate relationships with boys, but he admitted some level of inappropriateness on television and paid tens of millions of dollars to families to keep information related to those inappropriate relationships from reaching public ears.

So while you can accuse me of anything you want, you cannot accurately state that I've admitted to inappropriate relationships with young boys on television and you cannot accurately state that I've paid tens of millions in hush money to families of young boys that stayed overnight with me at my secluded residence. All of those things can be accurately stated when speaking about Michael Jackson.

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[teknopurge]

"Michael sold 750+ million albums."

Probably 75% of the sales go to teenage girls who love overdubbed, synthesized music and guys who look like girls.

The jackson 5 didn't use synth's or much, if any, dubbing. What I take issue with is that MJ was someone who clearly was never happy with himself - so much so that given his resources he did everything possible to alter his self-image. I think there are many people out there that can relate to what MJ displayed publicly, only most people have the luxury of dealing with most issues privately. Granted MJ was paid well for his life in the spotlight, but what is different about MJ from other celebs is that he lived his entire life in the spotlight - he knew nothing else. MJ is someone that excelled at entertainment but failed at life, and it wasn't his fault - it's all he knew.


That thing with the molestation/extortion? Look at his interview with that reporter - MJ honest to god didn't think there was anything wrong with sleeping in a bed with kid(s). He looked at that reporter like a dear-in-headlights and couldn't figure out why the reporter was making an issue of it. MJ was naive: that doesn't make him bad, it makes him a target.


RIP MJ. Hope you found happiness.

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[slashmojo]

He may have had a huge effect on the music industry, but he didn't have much effect on the rest of the world - which amounts to quite a lot.

750M albums sold and about 6B people on the earth now plus no doubt hundreds of millions more singles sold, dvd's, videos viewed on mtv and every other channel in the world, countless radio station plays and of course the internet.. I'd say he had an effect on a VERY significant portion of the worlds population.

I'd hazard a guess and say there are very few people anywhere in the world that don't know him, even in the remotest, most backwards regions.. he's probably more famous than god and can moonwalk better.

It certainly wasn't "the music industry" that bought his music, they just profited from it.

Just to show how popular he still is - his new shows set to start next month in London sold out within hours - 50 shows, 1 million tickets.. and thats just for concerts in one country. That is impressive!

Like him or not, good or bad, he did have an effect.

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[drcagn]

I eat food and stay cancer-free so I can stay alive so I can watch film and TV, read books, look at art, and listen to music. If everyone focused on creating food and curing cancer, there would be no reason to eat food or cure cancer.

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[Rockoon]

From what I gather, he admited to sharing a bed. Didn't realize that that was active pedophilia.

Based on your required level of evidence, I hereby accurately state that you are an active pedophile currently engaged in molesting children, after all I can quote you verbatim as saying..

"I've admitted to inappropriate relationships with young boys"

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[Rockoon]

Just to add...

...as far as books the biggest seller of all time is the Bible.

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[Anonymous Coward]

It's a good thing a ./ poll actually means something.

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[Anonymous Coward]

This whole discussion just proves that I would dislike a good 65% of slashdot users, or what ever percent marked MJ as "forgettable" in that aforementioned poll.

I sure hope I never have to work with some of you in some IT job somewhere - The way you guys slam on a dead celebrity is sickening, no matter what faults he had, today should be a day to remember the GOOD things MJ did.

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[againjj]

Seriously, you think that the only people who are affected by the classics are classics majors?

Imagine losing all of Shakespeare, Twain, Wells, Homer, Verne, Dickens, Shaw, Poe, etc., not to mention works from unknown authors that produced Grimm's tales, Aesop's fables, Robin Hood, Beowulf, the Bible, etc.? Do you really have no idea how much of our culture is steeped in the literature of the past?

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[Anonymous Coward]

Why are these idiot postings getting positive mods? At least let the guy be buried before you drag (or re-drag) out his dirty laundry! Jeez, I REALLY hope I never have to work around people like this!

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[Darinbob]

I never bought any of his albums. And while I enjoyed his music I preferred other styles and artists. However, It I feel he had more overall talent than any of the stars in the late 70s and early 80s. Someone may have been a better singer at times, and someone else may have been a better dancer, and someone else may have had better music, but no one had that whole package the way he did.

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[Ant P.]

No retraction. He merely bought off the civil cases. Any moron knows what happened,let alone wise men.

Obviously you are a pedophile and serial killer then, since you can't buy me out.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Alexander the Great and Rumi prefered the yunguns. So give him a 100+ years and he will be a saint.

PS: Funny, the captcha for this comment was "aberrant"! He, like Elvis, I guess is still moonwalking among us in some form!

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[Anonymous Coward]

no matter what faults he had, today should be a day to remember the GOOD things MJ did.

Why? Many people here don't care about him and have said so. You want us to show reverence to someone who died, but would you want us to talk about the "good things" that Charles Manson did if he were to die? For better or worse, Michael Jackson had set up his public persona and this is the reaction to it. If we slammed on someone you hated, that would be okay, right?

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[phantomcircuit]

Actually I am very aware of it, almost all movies and new stories are based on classical literature. It means that rarely are there truly new stories, simply stories that are rediscovered or retold. That seems like a lot of wasted effort to me.

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[flyneye]

I for one will always remember the best thing he did was to die young and not molest any more children. He was talented enough to create the illusion that guys singing like a girl,dancing self indulgently in high-water britches with one glove was entertainment to the weak minded.
He will not be missed
      Poor ol' Chuck Manson showed street kids how to feed ,shelter and clothe themselves. He only ever killed a pimp holding one of his girls hostage. He knew how to throw a magnificent party.
What a stupid hippie. He will not be missed.

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[CodeBuster]

I agree. I was definitely in that later generation which grew up with Guns & Roses and while Michael Jackson was still producing new material and was known to us, I don't think that he had quite the same impact on that later generation, the so-called Pepsi generation (remember their, "choice of a new generation" campaigns?), as he did on the generation which grew up ten years earlier during the 1970s and followed him from the motown years and into the mid 1980s (when the gun's and roses generation was mostly still in grade school). In fact I would say that by the time "black or white" and "remember the time" came out in the early 1990s Michael Jackson was still popular but NOT as cutting edge as he was in the mid 1980s or as influential on the bands, like Nirvana, that would come to define the 1990s. The peak of Michael Jackson's musical achievement and career were really in the first part of the 1980s, especially 1982-1985, and he did not maintain that level into the 1990s; although he was still quite good compared to many of his contemporaries who even 10 years on had not equaled his dance and vocal performances in the pop genre IMHO.

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[Hatta]

He may not have had any serious musical talent (which pop stars do?),

Prince can fucking rock the guitar when he wants to.

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[flyneye]

Do you remember how Benito Mussolini was treated after his death?
The moral of the story is" Don't live life as a self serving asshole feeding off others or your corpse will be disrespected"

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[flyneye]

Your logic and reason betray you as the intellectually typical Mickey Jerkoff fan.

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[Draek]

We forgive war-mongering maniacs who cause the deaths of thousands just to further their political agenda simply because they belong to the same political party as we do(1), and you're wondering about simple allegations of pedophilia?

(1) Applies to both the largest parties in the US, and plenty others around the world. No political party or country holds a monopoly in stupidity.

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[blind biker]

Without our movies, music, paintings and books we would completely loose our sense of who we are, and where we've been. (books in particular, do you really think the world would not be negatively effected if all of the classics simply ceased to exist over night?)

(emphasis mine)
You know, if you are going to rant about the importance of culture, "books in particular", you should make sure you know the meaning of the words you are using.

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[Omestes]

That thing with the molestation/extortion? Look at his interview with that reporter - MJ honest to god didn't think there was anything wrong with sleeping in a bed with kid(s). He looked at that reporter like a dear-in-headlights and couldn't figure out why the reporter was making an issue of it. MJ was naive: that doesn't make him bad, it makes him a target.

No, the fact he obsessed with children, and wanted them to share a bed with him made him bad. Just because you don't know something is wrong, doesn't make it right.

That and, why the hell is some washed up, potentially pedophile, pop-star dying more important than anything else in the world right now? Does anyone actually CARE that much? Who the hell are these people? I've gone the last 20 years of my life never even thinking of the man (outside of some off-color jokes in the 90s), and my life will remain exactly the same without him. I WON'T miss him. I really don't care about him, and am perplexed by the people who are now jumping around saying how awesome he was, even though no one I know admit to ever liking him when we was actually doing something.

Not that he really did anything. He didn't change music, he wasn't particularly good at it. He was just a celebrity. This is like the strange frenzy around that Anna Nicole chick, or the "Princess" Diana chick, where no one can actually say WHY this matters, or matters enough to suspent 48 hours of our lives and news to nothing but coverage over them. Who the hell obsesses with celebrity? I'm genuinely confused.

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[gemada]

the 80's spawned the following extremely influential bands: REM, The Smiths, The Pixies, The Stone Roses, New Order, Sonic Youth, the list goes on.....

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[eleqtriq]

You need to familiarize yourself with his vast charitable work.

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[eleqtriq]

You have absolutely, positively nothing to back this up. Why your score is 5 right now is beyond me.

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[Tanktalus]

God, I'll bet you think he actually had something to do with writing any of the songs he recorded.

Why you got modded up, I don't know. I explicitly said:

I'm not sure what he wrote vs merely sang/performed

So, what I think is that I don't know what, if anything, he had to do with writing the songs he performed. Mind you, if he had nothing to do with the writing, I'm not sure why we'd be throwing mud at him for the lack of meaning in it... Meaning comes from the songwriter, performance comes from the singer/band. Give it up. There's plenty to complain about without making stuff up.

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[Anonymous Coward]

He even had to upstage Farah Fawcet's death.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Talking Heads rule!

You might also like some of these groups. I grew up more in the 90's, but have been going back lately and seeing what I missed from the last 40 years or so.

Some (new old) favorites:

        The Replacements
        Love and Rockets
        Mission of Burma
        David Bowie (late 70's stuff especially, like Low and Heroes)
        Echo and the Bunnymen
        Siouxsie and the Banshees

That ought to get you started. Who knows, maybe you'll hate all of that, but I like the artists you mentioned, so maybe you'll enjoy these.

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[Hatta]

None of which were terribly popular at the time, IIRC, save REM which sucks. Sonic Youth didn't really get popular until the 90s, nor did the Pixies who no one really noticed until Kurt Cobain ripped them off. I haven't heard of the rest. I'm not saying that there's no good music from the 80s, just that you had to dig real deep to get to it.

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[Hognoxious]

He merely bought off the civil cases.

And the criminal ones?

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[pbhj]

I'm not sad and didn't particularly like him, never met him, pitied him perhaps. He was, from what I've seen of him on TV, a mixed up freak with serious psychological problems. But, particularly now I've heard some of his work again I realise I've enjoyed quite a bit of his music over the last 25 years or so.

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[Hognoxious]

Do you remember how Benito Mussolini was treated after his death?

Congratulations. You have just invented a corollary of Godwin's law, "Il legge di flyneye".

It states that, for any given stupid Hitler analogy, there is an even more stupid one concerning Mussonlini.

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[teknopurge]

No, the fact he obsessed with children, and wanted them to share a bed with him made him bad. Just because you don't know something is wrong, doesn't make it right.

No worse than sleepovers when kids are young. It's not hard to find content about how people described MJ as a "manchild". With all his money he created a bubble from the outside - his own world. He built a private amusement park for chirst sake! IMO, he didn't do anything illicit with those kids, but even doing something like a "sleepover" between an adult and a kid is wrong, but again, he didn't know any better. The fact he didn't realize in the greater context of society that what he did was improper, it allowed people to take advantage for financial benefit.


As I said earlier, if those parents didn't plan to extort money and were truly concerned for their children, they wouldn't have settled.

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[roman_mir]

wait, so who got hurt?

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[Anonymous Coward]

Good thing for him he lived in a country where you're innocent until pronounced guilty. This "child molester" was acquitted of every charge.

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[smoker2]

You're a dick head.

Every form of music took some influence from jacko, whether it be heavy metal or dance. Just coz you didn't like it doesn't mean he had no influence. And all the allegations against him were just that. allegations. Nothing was ever proved. So fuck off you rapist.

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[Anonymous Coward]

the same could be said about Hitler you dickhead.

being famous for being a kiddie fiddler is hardly an achievement

most people would rather be non-factors than known for raping kiddies like mj

Re:Poll results

[jp102235]

Billie Jean (1983)
This is the video that changed history - the first video by a black artist to be aired on MTV. When the network refused to play the video the president of Jackson's record label threatened to go public with their stance on black musicians. MTV caved and Billie Jean was added to heavy rotation.

Re:Poll results

[Anonymous Coward]

tbh to defend a kiddie abuser with that much anger u look like u have something to hide urself

dunno how you can call the parent a rapist when you defend someone who is worse than a rapist, he was a fucking kiddie rapist

pls follow mjs lead and kill urself we dont need child molestors like you and mj in the gene pool

Re:Poll results

[drrobin_]

I think you underestimate the age of Nirvanna fans. The current "younger" population considers Nirvanna irrelevant. (Which, by the way, I consider good, as I too hate it.)

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[Anonymous Coward]

That wasn't cynicism. It was a well-reasoned response to the question of whether or not Michael Jackson is "forgettable" only to people who are too young to have listened to him in his prime. I grew up during that era, and I have no great fondness for his music. Note that neither I nor the GP has said that MJ is "mostly hated." Like any entertainer, some people like him and some people don't. It's incontrovertible that the recent years of the man's life have been weird and sort of icky. Have you looked at his face? He looks like a ghoul! In any case, I would consider him to be memorable, even though I don't really want to listen to his music.

Re:Poll results

[Loki_1929]

You're either missing or ignoring about 3/4 of everything I type.

First, he openly admitted sharing his bed with young boys (not as a parent thereof). In most modern societies, it's considered inappropriate for a grown man to sleep with young boys.

Second, he's paid off multiple families of boys who accused him of molesting them. Payoffs have been reported in the tens of millions after which the accusations suddenly vanished.

Thirdly, the one and only case that was ever brought to criminal court was pretty obviously absurd from the beginning and driven by a sociopathic mother who made the kids call Michael Jackson "daddy" for a long while until she decided he was a bad man. Her inconsistent stories and the puppeteering of her kids killed any credibility to any of the accusations made in that particular case. It's notable that it's the only case Michael Jackson actually fought in court. The rest of the time, families were quietly paid off to go away under strict non-disclosure agreements which quickly ended any potential prosecutions arising from them.

Numerous accusations of sexual molestation of young boys and the only one he ever contested was a farce from the start.

Re:Poll results

[styrotech]

While popular music on the whole really really sucked during the 80's due to the marketing stranglehold of large record labels, it still produced a lot of great stuff that was less well known. Music diversified quite a lot during the 80s, but it wasn't until the 90s or later that the newer genres grew enough to be noticed by the mainstream. Unfortunately by then, much of it had lost some (or a lot) of its original creativity or got ruined by attempts by others to cash in on trends.

And as an aside New Order and The Stone Roses were still huge sellers (maybe not in the US though), and it's probably a stretch to say Nirvana was a Pixies ripoff rather than just being an influence.

Re:Poll results

[Loki_1929]

See subsequent comments. The large cash settlements between Michael Jackson and the parents of young boys who spent time at his ranch are pretty well documented. Or are you taking the line that $20 Million was paid merely for time and company, and anything that happened was between consenting mental children...?

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[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, only because Qu'ran is being given away for free =)

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[MightyMartian]

. He didn't change music, he wasn't particularly good at it.

That, at least, is quite false. He was the first black superstar of the music video age, and even when he was a little kid, he was selling more records than most artists could ever hope to in a life time. His influence on pop and R&B music was enormous, which is why you have all these pop and R&B stars coming out, his peers and people who came later, saying he was a substantial talent and a major influence.

I don't see any reason to try to minimize his accomplishments. He made the single most successful record in history, was the first and only artist to ever have five number one singles of the same album and influenced an entire generation of artists. As far as numbers of units sold and influence, I think he probably forms the Trinity of post-War Popular Music Megastars along with Elvis and the Beatles. I'm not even sure we'll ever see anything like him again, because the music business has been so heavily altered that it's difficult to imagine artists ever becoming as famous as he or Elvis or the Beatles were.

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't have paid a buck to go see him in concert, never have owned an album of his, and never particularly liked his music. But anyone who says the guy didn't change music is either a liar or has lived in a cave for the last thirty years. Even in the more vapid field of music videos, you have to admit videos like Billie Jean, Thriller and Bad are pretty goddamned amazing.

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[MightyMartian]

He didn't user synthesizers any more than anybody else, and certainly a lot less than some other early 80s acts. Listen to Billie Jean, that's a real drum kit and a real bass, and that's a real string arrangement (we are talking about Quincy Jones here, the man has an orchestration fetish).

One of my favorite songs in the world, Baba O'Reilly, is completely based on a very percussive synthesizer. It's not synthesizers that are the problem, the problem came when some artists were basically more like guys sitting at keyboards essentially programming music sequences, with little or no real talent on any actual instruments, or when digital processing took over and people like Britney Spears who had vocal ranges somewhere in the neighborhood of a cocker spaniel were "helped" along with heavy sound processing.

None of Michael Jackson's stuff from his heyday was like that. He had, by all accounts, a very impressive singing voice, as a child and as an adult.

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[Loki_1929]

By the way, you're of course absolutely correct. Sure a 13 year old boy who had spent time with Michael Jackson was able to nearly perfectly describe Michael Jackson's genitalia and gave graphic descriptions of sex acts virtually no 13 year old would have known existed at the time (as this was pre-internet boom).

But you're right, I don't have a 35mm home video in which Michael Jackson shows his birth certificate while molesting boys also holding up state-certified age verification. Just a bunch of children who say a man sexually abused them, described the abuse in detail, and whose parents stopped cooperating with police investigations once they were paid tens of millions of dollars by said man.

And if you believe everything was perfectly legitimate with all of that, please contact me about some funds that my uncle (the former king of Nigeria) left to me that I need transferred out of the country right away.

Re:Poll results

[nxnikos]

You have never heard of The Smiths or New Order but have an opinion on popular music? I'd suggest you stick to your chosen field in which I'd like to think you are better informed on.

Re:Poll results

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you'll find it's your assumption that just because you seem to like Michael Jackson that he must universally be liked that's wrong. Not everyone has the same tastes.

If I had to pick some favourite tracks from the 80s then stuff by U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns and Roses, Bon Jovi would come well ahead of anything by Michael Jackson. They're slightly different genres, but frankly if I had to pick something cheesy which is the category I'd personally put Jacko's songs into I'd probably even choose something more catchy and recognisable such as A-ha's "Take on me".

No artist will ever be "universally liked" in the strict sense, but nobody has come nearly as close to achieving that as Michael Jackson. In fact, you're one of the first people I've ever seen that doesn't like his music... honestly. I generally don't like pop music and would probably fit more easily into the genres of the bands you mentioned, but I still love MJ's music and calling it cheesy is really selling him short.

As far as being of the "Michael Jackson generation", maybe you'd like to qualify that a little better. I started listening to him because my parents did, and they're about 38 years older than I am. Hell, even my grandmother who's 82 loves him. She was even part of one of his performances for the Dangerous album, if you can believe that (here's the video. She's one of old people in the choir. Side note: the song he did right before this featured your buddy Slash).

To say that Michael Jackson was the most popular, most well-known musician in history is by no means an overstatement. It may even be true that he's the most famous person in history, as well. It's fine to not like his music, but realize that you are in a very, very tiny minority, not that there's anything wrong with that.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, everyone knows that spelling nazis represent the pinnacle of culture and human achievement.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Proof or retract.

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[Anonymous Coward]

  Wow, he molested children? You made some very liable statements. You know all the facts? Were you there? Were you at the trial? No? Then shut the fuck up-- He is innocent till proven guilty, regardless how you feel about it- he IS NOT PEDOPHILE. He was tried twice, and not convicted, and the last piece of decency you should have is to respect the law that TREATS PEOPLE INNOCENT TILL PROVEN GUILTY...if not, then you Sir, not only a child molester, you use Windows at home -- So I heard, so that must be true!

Re:Poll results

[tomhudson]

"And the criminal ones?

The police said they were unable to proceed after the payment of a $22 million settlement and the victim refusing to testify.

So - bought off.

Re:Poll results

[Omestes]

That, at least, is quite false.

Granted, all of this is quite subjective, but he really didn't do much music, outside of singing (in falsetto). Like all pop music, they leave the background music to a machine, or anonymous strangers hiding in the background. Half of his lyrics were written by others too, so we really can't give him much there either.

He was the first black superstar of the music video age

To me this is completely irrelevant. I doubt many black people see him as a roll model (his lifestyle killed his role model, IMHO, as well). As for being of the music video age, this is completely arbitrary, there were plenty of black musicians who were there first, even if they weren't "pop". If anything, the Jackson Five gets more respect than Micheal.

This is largely taste, still. There probably a heavy dose of "I don't get it" here, since I genuinely don't, and never did. Back when he was at his peak of popularity (early-mid 80's), I was listening to Guns N' Roses, oldies, Boston, and classical music.

I suppose maximizing or minimizing his accomplishments is largly about what we value. I couldn't give a damn if his record sold 9 billion copies, or 750 million, it isn't an important metric to me. And somewhat meaningless, I'm glad he had an awesome publicist, and salesmen behind him.

Elvis and the Beetles did more than Jackson. Elvis translated blues, and other older musical traditions, to suburban white kids. I don't personally think he was any good, but we do owe basically EVERY modern genre of music to him. The Beetles were only good after they stopped being pop, and mostly rested on the fact that they had genuine talent, and were willing to try new things (the Beetles are the true birth of prog rock)

Yes, his videos were big. But again, this isn't something I really care about.

Re:Poll results

[Omestes]

As I said earlier, if those parents didn't plan to extort money and were truly concerned for their children, they wouldn't have settled.

Not really true. If they doubted they could fight against someone that rich, who could afford awesome lawyers, etc... they would have settled. Hell, if someone offers you 20 million, I probably would snatch it up, I wouldn't want to risk getting substantially less.

Its like settling with the RIAA. Sure, you could fight it, but you might end up oweing 1.7 million, instead of the couple thousand they wanted you to settle for.

Re:Poll results

[Rockoon]

I didn't miss anything

You admitted to having inappropriate relationships with young boys.

I'm just thinking of the children.

Re:Poll results

[MightyMartian]

You're right it's all subjective. Jackson wrote a fair chunk of the tunes that became hits. Sinatra didn't do that, and I don't hear anybody saying "Frank didn't do anything except sing the songs."

How many songs did Elvis legitimately write (as opposed to Colonel Parker insisting that he get a writing credit so he could get some publishing royalties)? As to Elvis's accomplishments, well, he certainly wasn't the first guy updating blues tunes, or translating blues. That belongs to Fats Domino, Ike Turner and Chuck Berry (I'd argue, pure musical influence wise that Chuck Berry is probably THE most influential figure in rock and roll). Elvis's big accomplishment is that because he was white, he could sing black music and get it on the radio. Elvis busted down one of the major racial walls.

And so did Jackson, and he was hugely influential. Thriller has informed a fair chunk of later soul, R&B and even hip-hop, and you can see the cadres of those performers coming out and saying so. Was he as talented as the Beatles? No, the Beatles certainly had the greater quantity and quality of great songs, but you betray the fact that you don't particularly like pop by essentially dismissing the early part of the Beatles' career, and yet songs like She Loves You, I Want To Your Hold Your and I Saw Her Standing There are phenomenal compositions, and stand out even today as some of the greatest pop songs ever recorded.

And Jackson deserves his due as well. Did he write any Strawberry Fields or Hey Judes, well, no, but songs like Billie Jean indicate, that before he went completely bonkers, he was an extremely talented songwriter who could even outfox a guy like Quincy Jones for the pulse of the public. Someone doesn't sell over a hundred million copies of a single album and just be a guy who sings falsetto. The timing was perfect, and I think you can say the same of all the megastars like Elvis, the Beatles and Sinatra. Talent was a big part, but being in the right place at the right time, with savvy management and promotion (and there were very few people as good at self-promotion as Jackson was during his heyday between 1979 and 1987).

Re:Poll results

[ResidntGeek]

You're right, his music was good for what it was but not great, it wasn't revolutionary or particularly influential, from what I've been able to discern.

What Michael Jackson did was bring music to people who didn't like music. He made people who don't like to dance often want to dance, and he made people who don't pay attention to their music tap their feet and want to sing along.

I don't listen to his music much, because it's not made for me. And with my listening habits, it's not as good as the music I listen to. But for a MUCH larger audience than I'm a part of, Michael Jackson's music is much better than anything I listen to.

Re:Poll results

[ResidntGeek]

Ah, but that's exactly the point - he had a huge effect on people _not_ interested in the music industry. Bands that play for people interested in music can't come close to his numbers, because he tapped into a huge audience they can't or won't appeal to. His music resonated with huge numbers of people who generally weren't interested in music.

Re:Poll results

[Anonymous Coward]

...always getting himself in the media by doing something pretty stupid

His hair catching on fire was a classic. He was an entertainer to the end.

Since Jackson was 99% plastic, they are going to melt him down and turn him into Lego blocks, so kids can still play with him.

**ducks**

Re:Poll results

[Hognoxious]

Nice sleight of hand. The way you word it (or rather, whoever you copied it from) implies that one is a condition of the other. Do you have any proof of a causal link? You really think a contract that binds one party to withholding testimony in a criminal case would be considered enforceable? One other thing. Prosecutors can serve a subpoena which obliges a witness to testify. Any ideas as to why that didn't happen?

Re:Poll results

[Stu Charlton]

A lot of people disagree with your view. This isn't a cut & dry case like OJ. The man had a serious Peter Pan complex, yes. Was a he a pedophile? I don't think so, and apparently neither did a jury.

As for his career decisions, etc., I think you are extremely wrong on this. Even a cursory look into the making of his records, videos, etc., shows the man had brains. There are numerous artists that have worked with him that will attest to this, unless you're going to write all of them off too.

Re:Poll results

[tomhudson]

You really think a contract that binds one party to withholding testimony in a criminal case would be considered enforceable?

Never said there was a contract ... just that one side paid the other $22 million to satisfy their civil complaint. With $22 million, they found their time better spent spending the money than cooperating in an investigation that any defense could now portray as a successful blackmail attempt.

Prosecutors can serve a subpoena which obliges a witness to testify. Any ideas as to why that didn't happen?

Only a judge has the legal power to compel a witness to testify, and that only if the prosecution first makes the motion. How many judges are going to order an under-age witness to testify about sexual assaults if they don't want to, for whatever reason, or even for no stated reason? Prosecutors know the odds of such a request being granted are somewhere between zero and none, and don't want to piss off judges they work with daily by filing useless motions. If you want more info, why not ask them? Or do your own research?

Re:Poll results

[Hatta]

Ooo burned by a music snob. All anyone needs to know is obvious if you just use your radio. Set it to a 90s station, pretty good stuff. Set it to an 70s station, very good stuff. Set it to a 60s station, groovy. Even golden oldies from the 40s and 50s, enjoyable. Set it to an 80s station, wall to wall crap.

Re:Poll results

[mdwh2]

Wow, I didn't realise everyone had the same taste in music.

Re:Poll results

[Hatta]

Oh, of course people have different tastes in music. Some people like good music, some people like shitty music.

Re:Poll results

[Hurricane78]

I was a child in the 80s, and I actually never listened to music, until the 90s came. I can only remember one Depeche Mode song. They were the early Electro-Pop. And coincidentally, I just downloaded a song of that genre.

Re:Poll results

[flyneye]

So anyway, Farrah Fawcett dies and goes to heaven. St.Peter meets her at the gate and says" You were a good person and were charitable and kind when you were alive. What wish would you have before you enter?"
          Farrah said " I wish the children of the world to be safer from predators"
      Michael Jackson dropped like a rock.

Re:Poll results

[Ant P.]

Just because you're one (by your own logic), doesn't mean I am.

Re:Poll results

[Hognoxious]

If you want more info, why not ask them? Or do your own research?

I did. I discovered that in the USA, you're innocent till proven guilty.

Re:Poll results

[mdwh2]

Oh noes! Not ... guys who look like girls! How confusing that must be for poor little you!

in other news???

[IlluminatedOne]

I wonder what important developments were kept out of the spotlight yesterday during all the death hoopla. It seems to me that all kinds of tomfoolery goes on when things like this happen and we find out after the fact.

In regards to the traffic issues, MSNBC had an 'auto-start' slideshow going on the homepage in primetime last evening, so it would seem they brought a lot if not all of this on themselves...

Re:in other news???

[elrous0]

All I can say is Mark Sanford had better send flowers.

Re:in other news???

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude no kidding. You know what this reminded me of? The Gary Condit media shitstorm. Nobody cared about him after September 10, 2001.

Granted that didn't actually fix any of his problems, but at least the wall-to-wall media coverage went away.

Ok, So How Would It Help?

[CWRUisTakingMyMoney]

Aside from being annoyed at the "cloud" buzzword I keep seeing, how (honestly, not rhetorical) would cloud computing help here? Wouldn't the often-updated news content (especially audio and video) still have to come, at its source, from CNN or whoever, since they're the ones writing/saying/videoing the news content? I must be missing something fundamental to cloud computing, so what is it, please?

Re:Ok, So How Would It Help?

[__aaxwdb6741]

Dunno. Perhaps we should read the fine article, maybe it explains a little more than the summary did.

Re:Ok, So How Would It Help?

[ceoyoyo]

Well, the idea is that when your website gets hit hard you can just use some extra, idle capacity "in the cloud." Works great. Unless of course everyone else is doing the same thing....

Re:Ok, So How Would It Help?

[3.5 stripes]

Supposedly cloud computing is "on demand" so, having more resources available when you need them (though who knows if it'll help in cases where bandwidth is a limitation) should resolve a lot of these problems. It'd probably also be a sort of intermediary, a cloud of caching servers, leaving the main servers to update the cloud..

Take that with as much salt as you feel it needs.

Re:Ok, So How Would It Help?

[bluefoxlucid]

A real load balancer and extra server capacity works better.

Re:Ok, So How Would It Help?

[bytesex]

If the elements of the 'cloud' were distributed all over the world, then: yes. However, we already have a name for that: it's called 'distributed computing'. But that's what people wearing purple pants do to your exact computing terms. Let's hope that this one doesn't go the way of the 'intranet' - which for some reason now seems to mean 'a web application dealing with internal data that can also be accessed from the outside', and not 'network of computers with internal addresses'.

Re:Ok, So How Would It Help?

[SatanicPuppy]

At it's heart, the idea is wide scale load balancing, so the bandwidth to any one site would be very hard to saturate, because that site could be served from multiple disparate locations at the same time. Likewise the processing power would be commodity driven, so no single node would be overwhelmed.

The problem occurs with widespread events. Load balancing works well when some systems have more load than others, but it's just crappy overhead when every system is getting hit.

I'm not sure in cases like this, that the "cloud" as it stands has the capacity to handle spikes like this.

Re:Ok, So How Would It Help?

[Dunbal]

Well, the idea is that when your website gets hit hard you can just use some extra, idle capacity "in the cloud." Works great. Unless of course everyone else is doing the same thing....

      You know, I'm trying very hard to try not to draw a parallel between your statement and the recent 'sub-prime' crisis.

Re:Ok, So How Would It Help?

[Vancorps]

CDNs like Akamai, Limelight, or Highwinds are more suited for this than the "cloud." as they require very little in the way of management unlike cloud integration which can be a huge pain in the ass especially if you're trying to maintain security.

Most cloud environments that aren't ridiculous in size like Amazon's wouldn't be able to handle the bandwidth and if they could it would be quite expensive and given that a current event caused the spike you will be hard pressed to gain additional advertising dollars to cover the bandwidth bill. So you go with a CDN where it's pennies for gigs of transfer and away you go.

Re:Ok, So How Would It Help?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Supposedly cloud computing is "on demand" so, having more resources available when you need them (though who knows if it'll help in cases where bandwidth is a limitation) should resolve a lot of these problems

It might help when CNN gets pegged. But since it's coming out of a shared common pool of resources, it won't help when CNN, MSNBC, Fox, etc. etc. etc. all get pegged.

Re:Ok, So How Would It Help?

[ColdWetDog]

A real load balancer and extra server capacity works better.

Don't get technical with me!

Re:Ok, So How Would It Help?

[3.5 stripes]

get this man a wheelbarrow for his grain of salt :)

Re:Ok, So How Would It Help?

[ceoyoyo]

Yeah, but you can't be a cheap ass fly by night operation if you do things like that.

Re:Ok, So How Would It Help?

[ceoyoyo]

Nonsense. They're totally different. Cloud computing has buzz words!

*now* you pull the trigger on the story..

[Duositex]

Isn't it funny how Slashdot seemed to be waiting for an excuse to put this story on the front page? Now that it's *mildly* I.T. related it's ok though right?

Re:*now* you pull the trigger on the story..

[v1]

Someone that popular is "news for anybody", regardless of who you are. Maybe to a lesser degree for some, but still.

Re:*now* you pull the trigger on the story..

[koh]

They did not want to add the Slashdot effect to the Jackson effect...

Re:*now* you pull the trigger on the story..

[ceoyoyo]

At least they waited until it was mildly IT related. I kept waiting for the story about the death of a washed up has been with an unhealthy appetite for children to hit the front page with no justification at all.

Re:*now* you pull the trigger on the story..

[palegray.net]

It wasn't News for Nerds until stuff started breaking.

Re:*now* you pull the trigger on the story..

[MiniMike]

There was no need to worry, the sites were pre-Slashdotted. Which, ironically, is what the actual story is about.

Re:*now* you pull the trigger on the story..

[larry bagina]

CmdrTaco died? I know he didn't like "naval [sic] gazing", but I think that's valid slashdot news.

RIP, Rob Malda.

Re:*now* you pull the trigger on the story..

[hefa]

I don't see why you're complaining. Compared to much of the other stuff that gets posted on slashdot lately, this is at least, as you point out, IT related. Seems comparatively relevant to me.

Re:*now* you pull the trigger on the story..

[whyloginwhysubscribe]

Well it is interesting - Google certainly thought that I was an automated request when I tried searching for Michael Jackson on my mobile phone via Opera...

The BBC has an interesting blog post essentially dispelling the myth that the internet "broke" when the story first appeared... http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/06/jackson_did_the_internet_buckl.html

Re:*now* you pull the trigger on the story..

[dangitman]

He didn't like looking at ships? That's pretty perverted.

"cloud blogger"? no, jizbuket

[Anonymous Coward]

jizbuket

A sad and happy day

[elrous0]

Sad for the fans, happy for the millions of kids who can now safely venture outside

Re:A sad and happy day

[ripnet]

Michael Jackson wants to be buried at sea, preferably attached to two buoys

What's the difference between Michael Jackson and Alex Ferguson?  Ferguson will be playing Giggs in August

His family have decided to have his body melted and turned into toys. It will give kids the chance to play with him for a change.

He did manage to whisper one thing to the paramedics on the way to the hospital "get me into a children's ward"

Monkey for sale, house trained, can dance a bit, contact never never land USA

Reports of his death are incorrect. He's been found in a children's ward having a stroke.

Apparently it wasn't a stroke, but skin cancer...Don't blame it on the sunshine..

I thought they were melting him down in to cups so that kids could still get their lips around his rim?

Michael Jackson didn't actually die of a heart attack................It was food poisoning from eating 15 year old nuts.

Out of respect, McDonalds have released the Mc Jackson burger, 50 year old meat between 10 year old buns...

It was touch and go in the Hospital, and that was just on the Children's ward....

MJ's ghost has been seen walking the wards of a Children's hospital. Looks like he will continue to try and put the willies up small children.

They released candle in the wind for Princess Diana. Apparently they are releasing Rolf Harris' 2 little boys for Jackson.

Jackson has cancelled his upcoming dates. They were James aged 9 and Tom 11.

On his death bed Michael Jackson requested that his ashes be packaged into a box of Rice Krispies, It is believed that this is so that he can have the feeling of going through a ten year old's @rse one last time

In a tribute to the late Michael Jackson, his close friend Rolf Harris will be doing two little boys at his funeral

Elton John will be playing at his funeral - "Don't Let Your Son Go Down on Me"...

His body was found slumped over a pram he had apparently tripped over.  A police spokesman said it was too early to determine whether they should blame it on the buggy.

Los Angeles police have now been round to Michael Jackson's Neverland ranch following his death. It is being reported that they found Class A drugs in his kitchen, Class B drugs in his bathroom and Class 4C in his bedroom.

MJ passed away at 3:15am. Which is ironically when the big hand touches the little hand.

Jockeys this weekend will wear black armbands in remembrance of MJ, who has successfully ridden more 3 year olds than anyone else.

Re:A sad and happy day

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Do you happen to know any case of a parent not letting their kids play outside because of Michael Jackson?

This obsession with paedophilia is getting out of hand. Sure, it's despicable and it's a crime for a good reason. Yet, people like you face paedophiles as if they were far worse than convicted killers. Where is the rationale behind that? There is none. To make matters worse, your attitude towards alleged paedophiles, even if the allegations are void of any merit, are still far worse than those regarding violent criminals.

So get your head out of your ass and at least try to jump-start your brain. Your righteous indignation is starting to screw up your views on society.

Re:A sad and happy day

[Anonymous Coward]

Wha? If Michael Jackson had killed a guy, people would probably be making snide comments about that as well. Actually, he probably wouldn't be getting such wild acclaim in the press...anyway Michael Jackson is already dead and burning in hell so what does it really matter.

Re:A sad and happy day

[Anonymous Coward]

mod parent down for the implication that Jackson raped children

Re:A sad and happy day

[SnarfQuest]

So you're claiming it was consential?

Re:Puns

[MyLongNickName]

I predict a flood of MJ puns in /.'s near future.

Please tag this article "justtellthemtobeatit"

Thanks.

*sigh*

[vertinox]

I hate to say this, but things like this (and Anna Nichole Smith) make me weep for humanity.

We put too much interest in people whose saving grace is that they can put a song together when there are so many other problems in the world that need resolving.

Do you think world would have paid as much attention to Stephen Hawking if he died?

I'd doubt it but he's probably made a greater contribution to mankind over the long term compared to MJ.

Secondly, MJ kind of screwed the pooch when it came to financial responsibility. The guy was known to publicly throw tantrums at his personal assistants when they told him to stop buying everything in the store and spent millions on stuff like paintings, statues, and luxuries that none of us could ever afford.

Hell... For all the grief we give about Bill Gates, at least he is doing something for humanity that is good other than spend money on luxuries. The guy is not a hero and we should not look to him for inspiration. Plenty of other people in streets of Iran to look for that.

Re:*sigh*

[Dunbal]

I hate to say this, but things like this (and Anna Nichole Smith) make me weep for humanity.

We put too much interest in people whose saving grace is that they can put a song together

As far as I know the only thing Anna Nicole Smith ever put together were two oversized sillicone filled breasts. Having them exist simultaneously in the same universe, much less on the same torso, was itself a feat I admit.

Re:*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

and spent millions on stuff like paintings, statues, and luxuries that none of us could ever afford.

Apparently, neither could he. It's being reported that his debt is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Re:*sigh*

[basementman]

Society rewards greatness in competitive, valuable fields. Writing music may not be as valuable as curing cancer, but no one in this comment thread could write/sing a song as well as he. So that's why we reward him, despite his personal shortcomings.

Re:*sigh*

[maxume]

You think Bill Gates doesn't buy whatever the hell he wants?

There is a big difference between a pop star who maybe made $1 billion (Google results suggest closer to $500 million) and a CEO who is worth $40 billion. I mean Gates could still buy 10 times the crap Jackson did after donating half his worth to charity, and then buy it all again.

I'm not trying to criticize Gates, I think his choices about what to do with his wealth are pretty reasonable, I'm just pointing out the absurdity of the comparison.

Re:*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

Musical talent will always have much more worth than scientific ability.

It's always been that way and always will.

Science will not get you laid or induce emotional passion or romance...music will.

You're right, when Steven Hawking dies...not many people will care, nor miss him. Whether this is right or wrong, is besides the point, it's just what it is.

Music = emotion and feeling.

Science = logic and calculated existence.

The human spirit craves the former, in all regards. Music is worth more than science could ever dream to be worth to the human mind. It is unexplainable, therefore supreme to science in every way.

Deal with it.

Re:*sigh*

[slyn]

For the a lot of people who grew up during his heyday, Michael Jackson was "The King of Pop". As a singer/performer, he helped define a genre during his time. People remember the emotions of getting pumped up before a game to a song, or losing their virginity to a song, or getting through a rough time with a song. Those emotional attachments create powerful memories and connections.

When my grandfather died my mom listened to the same Yanni CD for like 12 months straight and it never occurred to me why until like 4 years later when I made the connection that that was what we would always listen to on our weekly visits to the nursing home, and that the songs soothed her and helped her cope with the loss. Because of that, Yanni (whose music I'm not even a fan of) evokes a pretty strong emotion to me, and a much stronger emotion from my mom. The completely intangible feelings that music can give you can feel _more_ tangible or be more rememberable than the changes to our lives brought about by the achievements of some guy in a lab, even if those lab achievements mean far more to mankind in the long or short run.

Re:*sigh*

[Kozz]

See, I kind of figure that we really can't take all these deaths of public figures TOO seriously. Employing gallows humor, I'd posted on my social networking site [which shall remain nameless] the comment, "It's confirmed: rhinoplasty kills."

Jackson and Fawcett were their own interesting but odd/unique people (to put it mildly). I'm not crying, sending a card or flowers. If we mourned every death we'd get nowhere, right?

Anyhow, my wry comment wasn't well received. I think people need to lighten the fuck up.

Re:*sigh*

[vertinox]

Society rewards greatness in competitive, valuable fields. Writing music may not be as valuable as curing cancer, but no one in this comment thread could write/sing a song as well as he. So that's why we reward him, despite his personal shortcomings.

Yeah, but isn't that the problem with society?

We reward the wrong competitive that in the end really wastes our limited resources. Its not his fault that society liked his songs, but rather shouldn't we realized that in the end we shouldn't just be sheeple ingoring our own plight.

I mean its the same thing with sports stars.

These people aren't doing anything that will enrich humanity over the long term in tangible benefits other than entertainment.

In fact this behavior actually puts us in danger. We need to find engineering solutions in the future for catastrophic events that will eventually happen.

Will a pop star be able to save us in the event of a meteor impact?
What about global warming, tsunami, outbreak of a virus, nuclear proliferation, global famine, and what about the samll things?

Like old age, cancer, car accidents, peak oil (well this isn't small but it won't kill us) and so on...

We need math, science, and engineering for these solutions and it saddens me that society puts so much into stuff that in the end won't save us when it chips are down.

Re:*sigh*

[SuiteSisterMary]

Will a pop star be able to save us in the event of a meteor impact? What about global warming, tsunami, outbreak of a virus, nuclear proliferation, global famine, and what about the samll things?

Well, to be fair, most people of 'my' generation are fully aware that a single pop singer can, in fact, help defeat an armada of 4.7 million alien battleships, crewed by fifty-foot-tall aliens.

We're also aware that transgendered (or, at least, cross-dressing) pop stars are in an excellent position to help the resistance against invading hive-mind type aliens.

/We Will Win!
//My Boyfriend's a Pilot!
///Shao Pai Long!
//Wait a minute, this is Slashdot, not Fark.
/.

Re:*sigh*

[mario_grgic]

For all the grief we give about Bill Gates, at least he is doing something for humanity that is good other than spend money on luxuries. The guy is not a hero and we should not look to him for inspiration. Plenty of other people in streets of Iran to look for that.

He's going to have to do a LOT of good to make up for Windows.

Re:*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

"The King of Pop" label came about because he said he wanted to be called that. For the last 15 years or so, he's just be a side freak with kiddy-fiddling baggage. You rarely here his music anywhere, even at 80s nights in clubs. Sure, lots of people bought Thriller back in the day, the day when CDs choice was limited, music was totally controlled by MTV. I'd like to see how many itunes sales he's had before yesterday for the younger generation.

As for being up with Elvis, I don't think so. I recall women all over the place crying about it, does anyone give a shit about Jackson today, other than the few fans around? Tomorrow the world will have moved on, trashing the Terminator movie or something just as trivial.

Re:*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

I cannot mod you up... although I have mod points, i do not know wwhat happens with /. crap, but you deserve to be modded up

xtracto

Re:*sigh*

[collar]

We reward the wrong competitive that in the end really wastes our limited resources. Its not his fault that society liked his songs, but rather shouldn't we realized that in the end we shouldn't just be sheeple ingoring our own plight.

....

Will a pop star be able to save us in the event of a meteor impact? What about global warming, tsunami, outbreak of a virus, nuclear proliferation, global famine, and what about the samll things?

Society needs a balance, entertainment and the arts in all it's forms (music, movies, sports etc.) is an important of people's lives, it's an important part of society it's self. Those people doing research and working hard on fixing various problems that afflict our society like everyone else take a break by cranking up some music or yelling at the TV whilst watching whatever sporting team they support.

Life can't be just about "serious" things. I agree that we don't necessarily fund or acknowledge those things which make a major impact towards advances for the human race, but I can tell you that my life would a far worse place without music, sports and books to read, and that the producers of those have enriched my life also.

It's easy for these sort of things to get to the "but the goverment should fund schools, police and hospitals more, aren't they more imporant than " argument. The truth is that you can't fund somethings to the complete exclusion of others, even though those things are more "important", you end up with a very unbalanced world.

End rant.

Re:*sigh*

[samkass]

We put too much interest in people whose saving grace is that they can put a song together when there are so many other problems in the world that need resolving.

Yeah, if only Michael Jackson had co-wrote "We Are The World" for hunger relief in Africa, donated millions to charities for drug and alcohol abuse, broke down racial barriers, send millions in food to Sarajevo, and countless other humanitarian acts. Oh wait, he did.

Re:*sigh*

[MightyMartian]

His star had certainly faded. Elvis had the good fortune not to have lived long enough for his legend to catch up with him. Elvis had his own creepy relationship with Priscilla when she was pretty damned young, and stories that came out after he died hardly painted a flattering picture. In a lot of ways, he was like Jackson, a prescription pill addict with pretty severe emotional problems who spent the last fifteen years of his life pretty much isolated from the rest of the world. If Elvis had lived even ten years longer, I think the world would have remembered a considerably different man.

Re:*sigh*

[Reverberant]

Hell... For all the grief we give about Bill Gates, at least he is doing something for humanity that is good other than spend money on luxuries.

Bill Gates isn't spending his money on luxuries?

In any event, Michael Jackson also used his creative energies and wealth to help the less fortunate.

Re:*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

If only I wasn't a coward I would mod you up. This is why I think most people's favorite bands are from the beginning of their teenage years. It's when we first start to really like music and appreciate it, it's what we turned to during those turbulent times. All the emotions (mostly from the sudden surge of hormones) that we experienced during those years we link to the music we we're listening to. Sure, in my adult years I can listen to new bands and appreciate what they're doing and like them but the nostalgia from those first bands I fell in love with is just so strong no matter how good the new bands are they just can't compare.

Re:*sigh*

[ArsonSmith]

This is why I have more respect for motorsports than the regular athletics. At least in motor sports there is a bit of tech involved. I really wish the battlebots/robotwars fad hadn't passed. Gladiatory combat through technical means I thought would have been an awesome way to help progress robotic development. Sure it was 99% remote control in it's time, but that would have slowly evolved. I had plans of building one and using movement macros/combos, rather than just pure remote control.

There is tech that comes from athletic sports though as well. Sometimes healthy sometimes not. Often in medicine and keeping a body in top shape for the longest possible time even when put under stress. Small things like tech in shoes, pads, and other equipment or large things like architectural achievements are also tech advances from sports.

In the end, curing cancer isn't the only new tech left to discover.

Re:*sigh*

[dargaud]

This is why I have more respect for motorsports than the regular athletics. At least in motor sports there is a bit of tech involved.

You have no idea how much (bio)tech goes into athletics *ahem* enhancements. I had an insightful talk last WE with an triathlete who's also a doctor and who described some of the common and upcoming doping methods. Those guys are way ahead in fields that standard medicine wouldn't touch with a 10-foot FDA-approved pole. Stuff such as recombining some of your own DNA, in-situ !

Re:*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

while perhaps none of his songs may have touched you one look at the billboard charts will show that people embraced his music, and yes some people do gain inspiration for life through music. As for Bill Gates and charitable causes, you really don't have an idea who you are talking about other that the latter part of his life which was indeed questionable, because the man did participate in plenty of charitable causes (Africa, etc) and also gathered a bunch of stars together for Heal The World so I suggest you do a bit of research before you jump the gun on something you don't know about.

Re:*sigh*

[Dragoness Eclectic]

Okay, so having art, music & culture is a "waste of limited resources"? Sorry, I prefer to be a human being rather than an organic thinking machine. Art & Music & culture in general are part of what makes us human.

Other news that came out yesterday in addition to MJ dropping dead was the discovery that humans were making musical instruments 35,000 years ago. (Not to mention carving pornographic fertility fetishes. Porn: the oldest form of Art). Apparently Ice-Age Cro-Magnon hunters considered making music just as worthy of effort as finding clever new ways of chipping better spearpoints. ...possibly because music is one of those things that is integral to the human mind, like language. There is a tie between music and mathematics in the human brain, and music is comprehended by and stimulates entirely different sections of the brain than spoken language. It's quite important to human mental development.

Love of music is not a "problem with society". It may be the savior of society.

p.s. IMHO, Michael Jackson's music was eh, okay. His dancing, on the other hand, was utterly awesome.

Re:*sigh*

[sootman]

For all the grief we give about Bill Gates, at least he is doing something for humanity that is good other than spend money on luxuries.

Score: -1, factually incorrect. From USA Today's coverage:

Jackson had a huge soft spot for charitable causes. He gave millions of his own money and helped raise millions more to support advocacy groups ranging from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation to the American Cancer Society. His efforts prompted a listing in the 2000 Guinness Book of World Records for most charities supported by a pop star. [emphasis mine]

He donated $1.5 million to a burn center, the proceeds from a settlement he received from PepsiCo after sustaining second-degree burns to his scalp while filming a 1984 TV commercial for the soft-drink giant. Later that year, he donated an additional $5 million to charity from his share of the Jackson 5's Victory Tour. Also that year, he was honored by President Reagan for his contributions to combat drug and alcohol abuse.

Jackson also co-wrote with Lionel Richie We Are the World, the star-laden 1985 single that sold 20 million copies, raising millions for famine relief.

Re:*sigh*

[slack_prad]

But he has kept a LOT of people inspired/entertained.

Re:*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

"remember the emotions of getting pumped up before a game to a song, or losing their virginity to a song"

reality check - your references mean exactly what to the average /. reader??

Re:*sigh*

[CorporateSuit]

Hell... For all the grief we give about Bill Gates, at least he is doing something for humanity that is good other than spend money on luxuries. The guy is not a hero and we should not look to him for inspiration. Plenty of other people in streets of Iran to look for that.

Michael Jackson won 15 awards for his humanitarian efforts that I could immediately find. Bill Gates has won 2 that I could immediately find. Michael Jackson was 50 when he died, Bill Gates is 52 and has more resources. You have simply been blinded by the jokes and allegations about ole Jacko. Outside of his music, he was a humanitarian, and he had many friends. He was a compulsive buyer, had serious daddy-issues, and was very, very weird -- but for a man his age, he probably changed the world, for the better, more than you, me, and every other current slashdot poster put together.

Re:*sigh*

[elton247]

I agree.
I barely heard anything when Arthur C Clarke, yet I believe he contributed way more to humanity then MJ.

Re:*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, then we'll make it a point not to mourn your death, and focus on more important things.

Re:*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you think world would have paid as much attention to Stephen Hawking if he died?

Yes.

I mean come on, the man is probably the most well-known and widely recognized scientist since Einstein.

He's been on the goddamn Simpsons. And Conan O'Brien. He's the legendary smartman of this generation.

Re:*sigh*

[Ilgaz]

I hate to make you more sad but I am somehow sure the people on streets of Iran also may have cared of death of Michael Jackson.

When media speaks about ''first true global star'' they know something.

In fact, people from Mid East thinks whatever happened to him (in his life) was happened mostly because he was a black guy. It is not just mid east, Trey and Parker also suggested similar thing in South Park.

It is not just about his music and some music videos, it has a deeper global meaning, not just that ''he was black'' thing either.

Re:*sigh*

[z-j-y]

he provided entertainment in the billions of man-years. having a good time is a big problem to be solved. you are the kind of self righteous person that forgets that human feeling is in the center of everything we do.

Cloud

[Martz]

What if everyone uses Cloud hosting?

The Cloud works for some customers because they are depending on under-utilization of the available resources. If all the news agenices, Twitter and Facebook all used Amazon then perhaps it would create the same melt down.

Re:Cloud

[SatanicPuppy]

That's exactly what I was thinking. Right now these sites have to spend a certain amount of cash to prepare for these types of events. If they were all "in the cloud" then they wouldn't bother with that extra capacity...The cloud can cover it, right?

As soon as some generalized event comes along that saturates a number of big "cloud" subscribers, then the whole system is going to be heavily taxed, not just a few individual sites, and by the very nature of the "cloud" thing, that will affect a wide number of sites outside the sites that would otherwise be affected.

You're going to have to sell me on redundancy before you can get me to buy into magical cloud land.

Re:Cloud

[mjmartin_uk]

Mod parent up. Absolutely.

Of course the big sites don't have redundancy for a big unfortunate event like this and I question the commercial viability of even adapting their achitecture to suit rare events. Is it really worth scaling like that for a rare event? Is it really worth re-addressing their systems architecture for events that rarely happen?

How much resource would that reorganising take? How much would it cost? We're in an economic down turn, do they have the money in the bank to address this when the money may be better spent elsewhere in their respective businesses rather than auto-scaling on big events?

What's the online ad revenue like at the time of a big event? How is that revenue impacted at the time the service experiences difficulties? Is it worth swallowing the cost of downtime?

I'm sure all of these questions may be going through the CTOs' minds at their respective channels/agencies right now. They should be.

Now I'm not disagreeing with Reuven Cohen's comments per say, I'm just pointing out that there's got to be a good business case for scaling to this level and that business case is going to vary from news channel to news channel.

Re:Cloud

[ezzzD55J]

from the blogpost:

why elasticity is so important when architecting your web application stack

while probably technically with merit, sentences, verbiage like this make me want to be sick. exorcist sick.

Re:Cloud

[fermion]

To me the issue is not how to get more resources when the load increases, but how to automatically decrease the resources needed for each web load. This requires efficient engineering and undestanding of the technology something I think is sorely lacking in many cases. For instance, the twitter page requires multiple database hits, and loads multiple thumbnails for every page. During crisis situations, these could be turned off with little loss of overall functionality.

I was on the New York Times site last night. I don't know if they added resources, but they did not go their crisis management mode, which is essentially a text only page. Maybe they have it worked out now so they don't have to. In any case, the kept the multimedia for Farrah, and added it for Jackson. I was also on the BBC site, and they were doing well, and that was with streaming video. Which leads to me believe that problems experienced by other sites may be a flaw in the implementation of current technology rather than a need for new technology.

Which is not to say that some sort of distributed processing is not needed. If an ISP is receiving multiple hits for a resource, it make sense for that ISP to send data from a cache rather than reloaded for the source 1000 times a second. This, of course, is a matter of policy and not technology.

Re:Cloud

[Blakey Rat]

Also, I'm 99.44% sure that Twitter is already using Amazon S3-- a cloud computing service-- and the summary itself says that they have to disable some features to keep up with the traffic. How come their cloud didn't help them?

The proper term for a "Cloud Blogger"

[Anonymous Coward]

...is "Cunt."

No comparison.

[Anonymous Coward]

How dare you compare that man to him! All MJ did was allegedly molest little boys and ruined their lives - big deal.

Gates on the other hand, has a monopoly! He single handedly is keeping Linux down! He's the one the ruined the IT industry and prevented innovation!

Of course, St. Jobs will absolve both of them for their sins.

My Pet Project Will Save Everything

[hardburn]

This wouldn't have happened if they had my poorly-defined buzzword idea!

Cloud in Neverland Fantasy

[syousef]

Cloud computing pundits seem to ramble about instant on access and scalability. Nice fantasy. What they actually want to do is make you buy into a single vendor system that's tightly controlled, which may or may not scale as expected when the time comes and that is plagued by the same outages we see from any service vendor.

Re:Cloud in Neverland Fantasy

[wireloose]

And to top that off, the blogger's whole blog post was off-target. He completely ignores that fact that we've been in a recession, especially the news industry. How are they going to come up with the huge investment capital to move their systems over to clouds at a time like this? Basically, the blogger is a troll.

Re:Cloud in Neverland Fantasy

[rantingkitten]

Right now a huge part of my job involves working on a proof of concept that our service can be moved into "the cloud". (Not my idea.) In the past two weeks while I've been working on this, I've noticed that instances spin up slower and slower as I add more and more, to the point where booting my baseline production environment -- little more than a vanilla CentOS install -- takes a good ten to twelve minutes. I expect it to get worse as we progress.

Scalability is great but when you glance over at your console and say "Oh, hell, we need more capacity RIGHT NOW!" and it takes twenty minutes to get the additional servers, users are going to assume it's "down" as they would anything else.

What is this now...

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the deal with everybody using 'slammed' this week? It's Ahmadinejad slams this, Obama slams that, imbecile facebook VP SLAMS intel and AMD...Anonymous Coward SLAMS slamming

Pog revival anyone? I'll go get my slammer!

Re:Michael who?

[bluefoxlucid]

THE authority on beer.

Not THAT slammed though...

[Scootin159]

Anna Nicole's death still ranked higher.

Personal View

[BigBlueOx]

Oh man. Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett dead on the same day. What a sad day for humanity. How will we cope? I keep checking the news outlets to see what Angelina Jolie has to say about all this.

Hey! What ever happened to that Ir-whatever thing? You know. Irast or Irag or something. You know. People marching about something somewhere. Whatever happened to that? Did Angelina Jolie ever comment?

Re:Personal View

[rezac]

When Farrah Fawcett arrived at heaven, God granted her one wish. She wished for all the children in the world to be safe. So God killed Michael Jackson

Re:Personal View

[iamhigh]

Your personal view is representative of a young, ignorant kid. Farrah was the greatest sex symbol in the US for over a decade. Jackson has the best selling album of all time. They were important figures in American culture and it is natural, and if I may, prudent, to recognize, celebrate and honor their contribution to our history. Even with all of Jackson's crazyness and trouble, he's still far more important, and likable, than your /. post. BTW, would you be so coy when a story breaks about the geek god Steve Jobs?

Re:Personal View

[ginbot462]

I can't believe the interest .. WTF has he done in years, scratch that, ever of importance that deserves this? Celebs on pedestals --- but Neda Agha-Soltan who?

Re:Personal View

[Anonymous Coward]

yea who said he was an apple fanboi? he probably likes linux, bsd or some over such thing.

Re:Personal View

[Anonymous Coward]

Christ, you don't interpret sarcasm well, do you?

Major Whoosh reporting for duty as always.

Re:Personal View

[Anonymous Coward]

Your personal view is representative of a young, ignorant kid.

Says /. user "iamhigh". Dumbass.

Re:Personal View

[grub]

Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett are trying on each other's wigs in heaven as I type this.

Re:Personal View

[FudRucker]

when Farrah Faucett died and went to heaven she asked god if he would protect the children, so god killed michael jackson

Re:Personal View

[Omniscientist]

Bravo! Bravo!

Re:Personal View

[religious freak]

You know, I liked MJ, and I think there is probably a strong chance he didn't molest any children. I just think he was a weird dude who had issues. I've read a lot of jokes on this page, and all were tasteless and not at all funny.

Yours was tasteless and hilarious! +1 dark humor!

Re:Personal View

[ausekilis]

When Farrah Fawcett arrived at heaven, God granted her one wish. She wished for all the children in the world to be safe. So God killed Michael Jackson

Yet the Jonas Brothers were spared? Where's the justice in that?

Its Princess Diana all over again

[mseeger]

Hi,

when Princess Diana died in 1997, we were supplying support services for one of the biggest news sites here in germany. It hit the site like a Tsunami. Unluckily someone reported in an IRC channel, that the news site would display pictures of the dying princess. So there was a real frenzy. It started early in the morning and we were called to fix a server malfunction. Unluckily the server malfunction turned out to be 99+% TCP SYN packets on the incoming side of the internet connect. That was at a time, when major news sites were connected by 2mbps lines :-). We were so fixed on locating a technical problem, it took us some minutes to connect the symptons to an event in the real world. Luckily the cab driver who picked me up had his radio on.

CU, Martin

What about the lifepods?

[happy_place]

I guess those life-preservation pods he was sleeping in were just a scam? I admit I was surprised at news of his death. He had such means, I just figured he'd outlive me... Now I feel like I need a T-Shirt that says, "I outlived Michael Jackson."

You know who else was affected?

[Drakin020]

The guys over in Iran trying to communicate via Twitter. I'm sure those guys really loved it.

Re:You know who else was affected?

[Drakin020]

Wow, way to be a total dick.

So 1 guy dies here in America, that makes it WAY more important than the dozens if not hundreds dying . Not only that, but this kind of stuff doesn't happen all the time. These people casted their votes, and found that it was a sham, so they are now dying for their rights.

Ohh damn, there I go again taking the bait from a troll.

Re:You know who else was affected?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they are a little more concerned with running and hiding from the jack-booted thugs protecting Iran's "democracy".

FINALLY

[tmkn]

Took you long enough to get news on Slashdot about MJ, now let's hear some justified, only slightly off-topic jokes about it!

"He's Dead Jim" - People Get over it

[tg123]

Slashdot he is dead the media is flooded with details about his life to the tiniest detail.
Why do you feel the need to add to it ?

Sure I felt sorrow after I heard he "kicked the bucket" but that was 24 hours ago.

Best we can hope for is he went to a better place.
If there is a heaven maybe he went there , if the stories about him and little boys are true maybe he went to the other place.

Re:"He's Dead Jim" - People Get over it

[gilesjuk]

It's just like Princess Di. They were slagging her off all the time until she died.

Re:"He's Dead Jim" - People Get over it

[jafiwam]

Considering he kicked the bucket yesterday afternoon, and he is still about 18 hours dead that's a considerable feat. What time zone are you in that has you 6 hours ahead of everybody else?

Re:"He's Dead Jim" - People Get over it

[tg123]

oops , my bad - correction 18 hours.

Re:"He's Dead Jim" - People Get over it

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha, I remember going in to work (a pub) on the morning after she died - I was like why's everyone upset that this snobby adulteress whore has died? Still don't really get it - sad for her kids but then she'd largely abandoned them anyway.

Re:"He's Dead Jim" - People Get over it

[mcgrew]

the media is flooded with details about his life to the tiniest detail.
Why do you feel the need to add to it ?

That's what we do here. It's called "slashdotting". It's sort of like a DoS attack, only legal.

Re:Michael who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty good on single malt Scotch too.

I can't believe people care about this!

[FatalTourist]

I am going to write a whiny, holier-than-thou post on the Internet to let everyone know that I know there are more important things in the world: starving children, Iran, etc. There you go, my sweet ego...

Re:I can't believe people care about this!

[jonnythan]

Post of the day.

Re:I can't believe people care about this!

[blind biker]

I am going to write a whiny, holier-than-thou post on the Internet to let everyone know that I know there are more important things in the world: starving children, Iran, etc.

Fuckin' A! I don't get what's so many news reports to write about? The man died, presumably of a heart attack. End of story. And yet, on BBC News there are 4 (I shit you not!) stories about Jackson in the top 10 read news.

People should chill the hell out and look at the big picture.

autopsy footage already available!

[ayahner]

I can't believe they got the autopsy footage bootlegged and on the interwebs so fast...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5830866813023883728

=TRAGEDY

[Stenchwarrior]

BUBBLES!!!! Dear GOD did somebody think of POOR BUBBLES!?!?!

Media and bad taste

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, the media vultures are already posting tasteless pics of dead MJ:
http://www.walyou.com/img/michael-jackson-thriller-remake-acapella-3.jpg

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

slahdot effect

[Atreide]

We all knew the /. effect on web sites

Here come (and go) MJ effect.

Sales after death

[gilesjuk]

I've never understood why CD and DVD sales leap after the death of a performer. Surely your praise and money are most useful while the performer is still alive?

Obviously with the huge amount of media coverage many people will discover his music and buy it.

It's a tragic loss, but then like many pioneers and super famous artists of the 70s and 80s it becomes hard to produce amazing music. Kraftwerk are a good example of this, massively influential but electronic music is so mainstream they can't do anything that stands out.

Re:Sales after death

[maxume]

It isn't particularly tragic. I guess his kids might be a little sad, but who knows.

Things like mothers dying during childbirth and parents outliving their children are tragic, but usually only for the people involved. A famous entertainer dying at a somewhat young age (but who knows how many drugs he abused, I have already heard speculation he was injecting himself with Demerol before he died) shouldn't be tragic for the rest of the world.

Re:Sales after death

[vondo]

Actually I was thinking that now I can actually buy a CD or two of his. While he was alive I refused to give him a nickel. Let's face it, in addition to being a very bizarre man with a horrible upbringing he was also almost certainly a serial pedophile.

Now it doesn't matter. My few dollars in royalties will go to his children.

Re:Sales after death

[tttonyyy]

I've never understood why CD and DVD sales leap after the death of a performer. Surely your praise and money are most useful while the performer is still alive?

I guess because you know "The Complete Collection" is actually complete. Like when I bought the Alien Trilogy and then they released Alien: Resurrection. The bastards. Die already.

Re:Sales after death

[grub]

I've never understood why CD and DVD sales leap after the death of a performer.

Simple: when an artist dies the torrents disappear.

.

Re:Sales after death

[slack_prad]

Kill the king. The king is dead. Long live the king.

Re:Sales after death

[Kenshin]

I've never understood why CD and DVD sales leap after the death of a performer.

Very simple. People who may not have the CD, and may not have listened to his music in years, want to listen to it now and remember.

The death of a celebrity is pretty much the ultimate reminder of his or her existence.

Re:Sales after death

[david_thornley]

Alien trilogy before Alien: Resurrection? I only remember two Alien movies. And, as long as I keep away from that section of memory that says "Disaster area: keep out!" I'll continue to remember that.

Re:Michael who?

[ginbot462]

Goes to show what's really important, doesn't get reported. His beer books are the best.

Cloud

[Fuzzums]

So if all those sites were "in the clouds", they would all demand extra (limited) cloud power. So unless default is to have 3 or 4 datacenters on standby...
But that would, in a way, conflict with the goal of efficient resources.

Re:Michael who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh crap,

that Michaels dead? I remember a talk show on belgian TV where he was invited. That certainly was a person whos a lot more fun to talk to then that singer guy. Had some great tips too deal with a hangover too.

let's call this new type of DoS...

[sxpert]

... the MJDoS ;)
defined as "whenever a well known celebrity dies, it takes the Interwebs with it" ;)

Re:let's call this new type of DoS...

[Blixinator]

Watch out celebrities, the internet wants you dead. Unless the internet doesn't want to give cloud computing proponents another arguing point. So, what'll it be?

You sir, are a sick individual

[wowbagger]

You sir, are a sick and twisted individual, and I salute you!

If only you could have worked Ed in there somewhere....

Incorrect

[mdwh2]

Since when was 44% a majority? (Unless the vote has changed significantly since you posted...)

And they didn't anyway - rather, 44% say they were unaffected by his death. The "forgettable" was just biased blurb added by the poll author, and can't be assumed to be representative of people's views.

I'd say that if 50% of the entire population are affected by your death, that's pretty damn good going.

What is a cloud blogger?

[mrstrano]

Is he in the air somewhere?

He's now watching YOUR children

[Anonymous Coward]

and there's nothing you can do about it!

Its sad really...

[Zantac69]

...that people care more about kiddie fiddlers and has been stars than the state of the world. Wackjobs blowing themselves up, morons shooting up a town, dunderheads tanking the economy - now that will possibly affect my life. Mike, Farrah, and Ed checking in to take the dirt nap wont affect my life...and neither will John + Kate + brats - John...and neither will Survivor or American Idol. I can understand the junkfood of it - people want something to take their mind off of how screwed up the world can be...and how their life has sucked since they could not get past the underwater stage of Super Mario Bros. Oh well...now I am humming the tune to stage 2-2 - so it will be ok!

I felt a great disurbance in the '80s Force,

[circletimessquare]

as if millions of sequined gloves and nippleated red swimsuits cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened, and the '80s will never be the same again.

Re:Michael who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just had to get a Michael Jackson story in there somehow didn't you Taco? I understand. I'm a fan too. Listening to Billie Jean as I write. This is a sad day. RIP Michael. You'll be missed.

Well. If it had been posted to a newsgroup

[Colin Smith]

The news would have been everywhere with minimal bandwidth consumed.

Basically, the webserver concept is broken for really big traffic.

Of course, the problem with usenet is it's too efficient. People can post crap too easily and get others to pay for it.
 

Re:Well. If it had been posted to a newsgroup

[moosesocks]

1995 called. It wants its flamewar back.

But seriously. In another thread earlier today, I came across this gem from RMS in 2007. Even more hilarious is the response to his message with an "ASCII Ribbon Campaign" banner at the bottom of his message. Hadn't seen one of those in nearly a decade.

He was a childhood idol to many

[phorm]

I remember that when I was young, MJ was very much an idol to many people my age. Who says we're looking to him for inspiration - or even as a role-model - in this day and age? No, it's the passing of something from our youth. We mourn what he was, not what he had become.

And yes, if Stephen Hawking passed I'd imagine it would still be a fairly big event as well.

Re:He was a childhood idol to many

[turtleAJ]

And yes, if Stephen Hawking passed I'd imagine it would still be a fairly big event as well.

Actually, just a silent whoosh of the electric motors.
It's pretty maneuverable.

The human race dissapoints me once again

[damburger]

The twitterverse has spontaneously shifted from being a (supposed) forum for Iranian democracy to a Michael Jackson tribute site. News sites reporting the death of this one man, this self-obsessed child molester with a surgery fetish, have been swamped with traffic whilst sites reporting the deaths of thousands of innocent people never have any problem coping with traffic: http://www.thehungersite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=1

I am an atheist, believing in no life after this one, and the upshot of this is I find all human life to have indefinite value - indefinite but basically equal. If you are mourning right now and your surname isn't "Jackson", then it is a direct affront to those who die through no fault of their own and are implicitly disregarded by the rest of the world during the absurd rituals we employ to mark the death of somebody famous.

I don't believe in human nature or historical inevitability. I believe in free will, and thus I believe people have a choice. Masses of people have made the wrong choice, and it makes me both sad and angry. The reaction to Michael Jackson's death, rather than the death itself, has put a real downer on my day.

Re:The human race dissapoints me once again

[zarzu]

so you think every life has equal value, it's acceptable to mourn over a death in your family but not over someone elses death because they don't have the same lastname as you and you're therefore not treating corpses equally. how is that anything other than a totally arbitrary line?

if you just said any mourning at all is an affront to everyone else who ever died, it would at least be consistent, but what you're saying is that there actually is more and less valuable life to a subject, family is more important. now i could list a hundred cases where family certainly is less important than other people who have actually contributed to your life in an important way, have changed you or whatever and your line would seem even more arbitrary. there's also another point to make: if you mourn for your family you will diminish the value of every life in your family before you were born (unless you have mourned every one of your ancestors), what makes your current family's life more important than your ancestors?

yes the attention to his death is way too much and he was a crazy twat, but your argument stinks and is an arbitrary line just like celebrity praise is. no matter whether you're an atheist (which i am too btw, to get that out of the way), theist, agnostic or whatever else you might be, life of different persons has different value to each and everyone of us, human life is not equal from a subjects point of view and there is nothing wrong with that.

Re:The human race dissapoints me once again

[damburger]

so you think every life has equal value, it's acceptable to mourn over a death in your family but not over someone elses death because they don't have the same lastname as you and you're therefore not treating corpses equally. how is that anything other than a totally arbitrary line? if you just said any mourning at all is an affront to everyone else who ever died, it would at least be consistent, but what you're saying is that there actually is more and less valuable life to a subject, family is more important. now i could list a hundred cases where family certainly is less important than other people who have actually contributed to your life in an important way, have changed you or whatever and your line would seem even more arbitrary. there's also another point to make: if you mourn for your family you will diminish the value of every life in your family before you were born (unless you have mourned every one of your ancestors), what makes your current family's life more important than your ancestors?

I exclude personal mourning purely out of sympathy. It isn't any more logical than mourning someone you've never met, but I know I will never be able to make this point to someone who is experiencing such mourning. Maybe that doesn't make my point 100% consistent, but it certainly doesn't invalidate it, and I am not a monster.

yes the attention to his death is way too much and he was a crazy twat, but your argument stinks and is an arbitrary line just like celebrity praise is. no matter whether you're an atheist (which i am too btw, to get that out of the way), theist, agnostic or whatever else you might be, life of different persons has different value to each and everyone of us, human life is not equal from a subjects point of view and there is nothing wrong with that.

My argument does not 'stink'. The line between a persons emotional reaction to someone they personally know dying and the collective emotional reaction that follows the death of a celebrity is clearly not arbitary.

Re:The human race dissapoints me once again

[zarzu]

The line between a persons emotional reaction to someone they personally know dying and the collective emotional reaction that follows the death of a celebrity is clearly not arbitary.

but the line between a persons reaction to someone in their family dying and any other person, no matter if you know, love, hate that person on any kind of level, dying is clearly arbitrary, and that is the line you drew.

Re:The human race dissapoints me once again

[value_added]

this self-obsessed child molester with a surgery fetish

Well, that's one interpretation.

I prefer to think of him as someone who wants to be Dianna Ross (and to the extent possible, a whiter version of her).

As for the "child molester" epithet, don't think that's a bit over the top considering its inflammatory nature? Seems to me that invoking the power of the mass hysteria of children being sexually abused is disingenuous when applied to somone who with a prediliction to living his private life like a ten year boy while forming relationships with other ten year boys. That he lost his childhood somewhere along the way is obvious to everyone. The armchair version of Dr. Phil in me suggests that his relationships with children, which may seem grossly inappropriate to most rational adults, is innocent at best, and non-abusive at worst. Or do you have first hand knowledge that wasn't available to the courts?

Re:The human race dissapoints me once again

[petrus4]

The twitterverse has spontaneously shifted from being a (supposed) forum for Iranian democracy to a Michael Jackson tribute site.

Exactly my point. Very few people truly give a shit about Iran. It's purely the latest meme, and absolutely nothing more. It will burn itself out in a month or two, and people will go back to wondering what Paris Hilton is up to, or who Brad Pitt's latest nookie is.

Do not respond to this with yet more self-righteous fake moral outrage either, Americans. You only provide more evidence of your hypocrisy (where Iran is concerned) when you do so.

Re:The human race dissapoints me once again

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen. The haters who are so eager to believe the worst about this childlike genius, despite his acquittal in court and despite his protestations of innocence, are betraying their own low charcters no doubt. Michael Jackson was a great humanitarian and a good man, besides being the most talented and influential performance artist of the video age.

In millions of households...

[Anonymous Coward]

"I can't believe he's gone!"

(sob)

(hits F5 to reload)

"No, it's still there. I just can't believe he's gone!"

(sob)

(reload)

etc.

World of Warcraft

[NetNinja]

At least the WOW servers stayed online.

Stop paying homage to him. If everyone was so concerned about him all the radio station would have been playing his music to get him out of debt.

The man died of an anxity attack. He was 400 million in debt. Now everybody wants to pay homage to him and have specials and yak yak yak yak.

Everyone now is making money off of his death.

Re:World of Warcraft

[cathars1s]

He sold out 50 concerts for his upcoming comeback tour. 50 straight concerts in London. In a stadium that's easily 200k in size. That's over a million people willing to apay to see Michael Jackson. I'd say he was still a popular performer.

Shouldn't we call it..

[mindcorrosive]

.. the Jackson effect?

Not funny. I am not the greatest fan of MJ, but still his enormous influence on the music we enjoy every day for the last two decades is undeniable. The traffic surge that effectively DDoS'ed several of the largest news websites is a proof of that.

Obama humour

[PhilHibbs]

It was all over the trade channel on World of Warcraft last night, and people logging in or entering a city would see "He's definitely dead, BBC are reporting it" and say "Who are we talking about?", and some wit said "Obama" which caused equal quantities of outrage and hilarity.

Just heard this on the radio, icon, etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

You Know I'm Dead, I'm Dead- You Know It
(Dead Dead-Really, Really Dead)
You Know I'm Dead-You Know-Hoo!
(Dead Dead-Really, Really Dead)
You Know I'm Dead-I'm Dead- You Know It, You Know
(Dead Dead-Really, Really Dead)
And The Whole World Has To Answer Right Now
(And The Whole World Has To
Answer Right Now) Just To Tell You Once Again . .
(Just To Tell You Once Again . . .)
Who's Dead?

Re:Puns

[Anonymous Coward]

The word on the street is that he died from an allergic reaction after eating 12 year old nuts.

What are you, a Catholic priest!

[Anonymous Coward]

Get your hands off me you sicko! Damn you, you Catholic priest. Just stop it, Michael Jackson. Let me guess, you have a pet named Dick in Neverland ranch and you want me to go with you to pet him, right?

Re:I'm replying to a troll

[Anonymous Coward]

And this improves our lives how?

Some people have the record for growing the world's biggest pumpkin

Having the biggest pumpkin and selling a great number of albums are in different category. Selling albums means, there are people out there who loves you.

And also we are talking about being immortal among people. The person who invented the modern toilet improved our life but who remembers that?

Re: roots of sabotage

[just fiddling around]

Wooden shoes are called "sabot" in French only (as far as I know) and the root of the word "sabotage" can be translated by "sabot job".

The reason that sabotage is used in many languages is that famous (early??) anti-industrial manifestations took place in France and involved stopping the machines with shoes as you said.

Let's put this in perspective.

[phantomcircuit]

Even /b/ on 4chan was getting hammered.

Re:Michael who?

[JamesVI]

... but better on beer.
The authority on single malt is Jim Murray with his annual Whisky Bible.

TMZ didn't break the news

[Big_Al_B]

TMZ only broke the headline. "Stories" have a beginning, middle, and end, covering all five traditional journalism W's, including why and how.

Even Wikipedia was hammered

[FunPika]

I was in #wikimedia-tech on Freenode when all this happened, and the Nagios bot in there was practically flooding the channel with notices of server/service statuses being critical/down.

Re:I'm replying to a troll

[morgan_greywolf]

The person who invented the modern toilet improved our life but who remembers that?

Evidently everyone who has ever used the terms 'crapper' or 'crap'.

Re:Michael who?

[TriZz]

HA! From the King of Pop to the King of Beer...

Re:Michael who?

[Anonymous Coward]

The real mistaken-identity "Michael Jackson" here is the radio personality. Both he and the now-dead singer of the same name have stars of fame in Hollywood. The singer's star was covered up last night (due to a movie premiere), so a memorial tribute formed at the radio host's star instead.

One Word

[g8oz]

Unctuous

Keynote is full of shit

[Anonymous Coward]

I am the Lead for one of the News sites that was listed in the summary, and I saw the Keynote alarms as well. I get them in my mail. The only thing is.... I also have the graphs of my sites and the MJ traffic is pretty high and has been sustained, but it was never bigger than at about 12:30PM yesterday when the cardiac arrest was announced. We spiked at about three or four thousand hits per second and are now holding steady at about 1800-2300 or so today.

I can honestly say that I have had similar burst traffic, albeit for a shorter interval, for a Brittney Spears parenting fiasco.

If there are any issues, it has to be network issues on the backbone or at the access points because my hosts have barely registered a hiccup for CPU and memory utilization and the network graphs show nothing that should be overwhelming even 10Mbps Ethernet, let alone the gig links we have.

I believe the upshot is that there has been higher global traffic utilization due to this, and I can't really see how "cloud computing" would have had any effect whatsoever on any of this. We are NOT overwhelmed, we're doing fine as far as I can tell, and were never not doing fine.

I will point out one thing that may be important: Keynote does notice when advertisers on sites are having problems and attributes it to the whole site (which is sort of fair, but misleading). So, I will have a perfectly operating site, but one or two of the third party parts of the page will lag behind. Having seen the alarms yesterday, when my sites were fully fuinctional, I am thinking of launching an investigation into exactly what Keynote was seeing.

Re:Keynote is full of shit

[tnk1]

I have to agree. Most sites at the level of these providers have hundreds of servers in multiple data centers already. They also have cached content with Akamai and all of that. I'm not sure what cloud computing does that they don't already do with their own assets.

I find it odd...

[Kaptain Kruton]

I find it odd that while the rest of the world seems to think Micheal Jackson's death is very important, Slashdot readers could care less about the death of the person. However, readers think his death's affect on Twitter is critical and actually take time to find statistics and links about this. $0.02

Livejournal was hammered last night

[Dragoness Eclectic]

LJ was hammered last night; the celebrity gossip community ONTD (Oh No They Didn't) apparently got something like 800 comments in 30 seconds on the Michael Jackson thread, then the LJ servers went down (much to the annoyance of those of us using other communities who could care less about wailing online about Michael). They finally came back up after locking the ONTD community's Jackson discussion.

Jesus, I don't what's more annoying....

[MC Negro]

...Christians that insist on injecting quaint little refrigerator magnet-style philosophy and superstitious dogma into conversations about death, or pseudo-intellectual atheists that hamfistedly bring up their personal beliefs (or lack of beliefs) at every fucking opportunity. For the more vocal atheist like the OP, here's a tip for winning over middle-of-the-road crowd : When you haphazardly ejaculate your "deep" musings into topics that really have nothing to do with them, you look just as fucking retarded and self-righteous as the zealous Bible-thumper prattling on about eternal hellfire or heaven or whatever they're talking about these days.

I am an atheist, believing in no life after this one, and the upshot of this is I find all human life to have indefinite value - indefinite but basically equal. If you are mourning right now and your surname isn't "Jackson", then it is a direct affront to those who die through no fault of their own and are implicitly disregarded by the rest of the world during the absurd rituals we employ to mark the death of somebody famous.

I don't believe in human nature or historical inevitability. I believe in free will, and thus I believe people have a choice. Masses of people have made the wrong choice, and it makes me both sad and angry. The reaction to Michael Jackson's death, rather than the death itself, has put a real downer on my day.

Wow! That's fascinating!

Please be sure and keep us updated on your personal beliefs and what they imply for your vision of the world! Afterward, take a moment to reflect on how you have the social and intellectual high ground on annoying theists who invoke their religion at times that are inappropriate and to an audience that doesn't care.

Re:Jesus, I don't what's more annoying....

[petrus4]

...Christians that insist on injecting quaint little refrigerator magnet-style philosophy and superstitious dogma into conversations about death, or pseudo-intellectual atheists that hamfistedly bring up their personal beliefs (or lack of beliefs) at every fucking opportunity.

Agreed. I'm noticing also that there seem to be very few atheists around who are that way for legitimate reasons. Most seem to be leaping on the bandwagon because it's the 21st century and all the cool kids are doing it. Just ask Richard Dawkins; he's really cool. ;)

It happens, though. Every religion that has ever existed has had groupies, fakes, and scenesters; In that respect, atheism is no different.

A little hypocritical, ain't ya?

[Anonymous Coward]

We put too much interest in people whose saving grace is that they can put a song together when there are so many other problems in the world that need resolving.

Kinda sounds hypocritical if you had enough interest in the topic that you joined the discussion.

IDK, I'm just saying . . .

You missed the obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to mention to the Eurotrash troll to whom you are replying that you never once claimed that most people hated MJ. That is a straw man. Thanks for the insightful comments.

PS, I wish slashdot would fix the damned CSS. I have sites in development that work better than this.

Re:Michael who?

[JackieBrown]

At least their name was Michael Bolton.

Then we would have some real madness.

Re:It Wasn't A Heart Attack!

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news, sikipedia was also hit badly last night!

Re: roots of sabotage

[feandil]

indeed, the "-age" is similar as "-ing" so you could call it "wooden-shoeing" I guess ...

Look on the bright side...

[Anonymous Coward]

In a couple of months they'll be able to remake that "Thriller" video.

This is riiculous.

[jotaeleemeese]

Michael Jackson made it possible for black performers to be in an equal footing with anybody else (in the US that is).

Before him being non white in the music industry in the US was a real ceiling, he refused to play ball with companies that would use this kind of implicit apartheid, he was so popular that radio and TV stations could not afford not to have him.

Re:This is riiculous.

[default luser]

This is absolutely true, this is the reason Motown Records got established in the 1950s/60s - to allow black performers the same chances at mega-stardom that white performers already enjoyed.

Michael Jackson may have spent some of his best years making solo albums for CBS Records, but even he can trace his roots to Motown Records (The Jackson 5 had a contract with Motown). My hats-off to them both for changing music as we know it.

It gives insensitive fucks like you ....

[jotaeleemeese]

... a taster of what art is all about.

So you where there.

[jotaeleemeese]

Why didn't you show up as a witness in the trials.

Jackson obviously made very bad choices in life: even if he didn't do anything untoward against children, he should have known better about how he related to children, having said this making stupid choices in life do not necessarily make you a paedophile (and the legal system says as much, so why people keep peddling things that have been legally checked?)

Re:So you where there.

[MightyMartian]

Whether the guy was a molester or not, the fact was that he was a very troubled guy. You read what some of the guys who knew him even during his heyday have to say, and this was a man deeply scarred by a violent, domineering father. And look at his responsibilities. One way or the other, the Jackson 5's success rest mainly on Michael. He, more than his siblings, was the gravy train. It's kind of sad, because between about 1979 and 1987, his heyday when he and Quincy Jones made three incredibly successful records, his eccentricities seemed more like a clever PR ploy (it's pretty much admitted now that he leaked the infamous picture of him in the hyperbaric chamber). But maybe it's true that some psyches just aren't built for fame, and I think the notion that he was some sort of man-boy who never really got past his teenage years is likely true.

People are calling his demise like that of Elvis's, I'm thinking it more resembles Howard Hughes.

Re:Last.FM was hit hard One way or another i said

[davidsyes]

he'll be back... he would just download into another body, in another place... and that when he returned, he'd tell them where we were...

Now, those sites are having a fate worse than being "slashdotted"... they're being... "Jacked", jacked up, jacked around, but, they'll recover...

Pay hush money?

[jotaeleemeese]

That is called a settlement.

One party realizes that irrespective of the truth the damage is too much to contemplate, so they try to settle.

It is funny how you, and other MJ haters, don't question the morals of the parents or guardians of the children that decided to settle. I know there is no amount of money that would keep me quiet if a child of mine had been interfered with, so I think one can also argue that if the parents settled that means they either put money before ethics and morals (in the case MJ actually did something) or were a bunch of scum-bags blackmailing Jackson knowing he had done something that clearly was inappropriate (sleeping in the same bed with children) but not illegal.

So we can play it both ways, which is why it is better to let the legal system play things out and accpet whatever conclussions are reached.

Re:Pay hush money?

[Loki_1929]

If the settlements were small in number and in monetary size, that would make a lot of sense. In this case, there were several such settlements amounting into the tens of millions of dollars. If the guy did nothing wrong, it's not going to cost him tens of millions of dollars to show that. You pay a settlement when your risk of losing court cases, assuming a certain level of penalties associated therewith, exceeds what the other party is willing to take. In other words, if I have a strong chance of losing a hundred million in suits or spending an untenable amount of time in prison, losing ten million in a settlement to make it all disappear starts looking good. But why would I stand such a strong chance of losing so much and having it stick past appeals? And how does paying out hush money (merely defined as money paid to keep people quiet) over and over again for tens of millions of dollars not cause incredible amounts of damage?

I don't hate Michael Jackson, I simply hate what he did to young boys. The guy might have been perfectly likable in person; I wouldn't know as I never met him in person. I'm sure there are plenty of likable pedophiles in the world. It doesn't mean I can't hate actions that destroy the lives of children.

And as for the parents, I'll rail against them every day of the week and twice on Sunday. What kind of negligent idiot sends their young child to go sleep in bed with a strange man? Or any man for that matter? Aside from a parent comforting a frightened child, why would any adult want a child in bed with them at all? Regardless of the answer to that question, one has to question the suitability of any parent who allows their child to stay unattended with a strange adult in such a situation. That wasn't someone's kids having a sleepover, it was an adult man inviting young boys to come sleep in his bed and negligent or malicious parents going right along with it.

As for the ones who settled, they're even worse. The first few who allowed it were probably starstruck, naive little fools who sent their kids to that disgusting predator without a second thought. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if all the others (following the initial accusations of molestation and payouts) were looking for a check. And no, it wouldn't surprise me if some later cases were simple blackmail. The one case actually brought to criminal court strikes me as one where Michael Jackson's people couldn't come up with a number to satisfy that nutcase, sociopathic mother.

So no, I don't at all agree with what the parents did. The only reason they had escaped my ire in posts until now comes down to the simple fact that I haven't been watching and hearing everyone glorify them all day long today. That honor has been reserved to the sexual deviant who liked sleeping with little boys.

Like I said, you sing and dance well enough, you can do whatever you want. We used to bestow such immunities on supreme leaders. Now we tend to do it with superstars. People have been treating this as every bit as terrible as when Princess Diana died. It isn't. This is a sick pervert being glorified because he released some great albums 20 years ago. Nevermind that the revenue he gained from those albums was later used to lure children to his bed and keep them and their parents from testifying against him about it after the fact.

Michael Jackson dies, apparently

[David Gerard]

The entire Internet melted last night as Michael Jackson wreaked celebrity revenge upon it, with Wikipedia, LiveJournal, Facebook and Twitter giving "service unavailable" errors.

Mr Jackson also got his own back on the media, with TMZ getting the scoop on his death and everyone else reporting it second-hand in a manner that showed they didn't quite believe them.

"We are utterly distraught and inconsolable about Mr Jackson's death," said Sony-BMG, as Michael Jackson albums occupied the top fifteen positions on the Amazon CD sales chart.

The O2 Arena will be running a thirty-night Michael Jackson tribute, with only fifteen minutes' less Michael Jackson each night than was originally contracted. "People may wish to hold on to the tickets as absolutely irreplaceable final souvenirs," said a spokesweasel, "rather than returning them for a refund or anything foolish like that."

The Twitter and Facebook websites were rendered particularly crippled under a flood of Michael Jackson jokes:

• Why did Michael Jackson cross the road? He didn't, he was dead.
• What did Michael Jackson say to the children? Nothing, he was dead.
• How does Michael Jackson pick his nose? He doesn't, he's dead.
• What did Farrah Fawcett say when she heard Michael Jackson had died straight after her? Nothing, she was dead.

"I'm appalled at the fuss over Michael Jackson," said Canberra taxi driver Peter Mackay. "So he died. Get over it. He'll be back on Sunday, yeah?"

Beethoven is not universal neither.

[jotaeleemeese]

What stupid thing have you got to say about him?

Please....

[jotaeleemeese]

Bunches of acts have acknowledge musical influence from MJ.

He also opened the doors to the music industry for many artists that have been literally gethoized for ages.

I truly think that when it is all done and dusted, Michael Jackson will be remembered as the most important pop musician after the Beattles, they both alone will stand as the giants of 20th Century popular music.

Yeah, fuck Beethoven, Mozart...

[jotaeleemeese]

Stravinsky, and the Beatles.

Who cares about people being able to put a tune together (Michael Jackson actually wrote his music, and introduced many influences in the same fashion as Aaron Copland introducing Jazz on his. Just ask any real musician, not somebody that listens for fun).

What a limited worldview.

[jotaeleemeese]

Evidence is now pouring from archaeological sites all around the world that link our ability to enjoy the arts (music, painting, dancing) with our innate humanity.

It is most likely that our common interest for artistic pursuits actually strengthens our social links, which have been mightily important since the time that our ancestors had to face the Neanderthals. Our evolutionary cousins it seems did not have sophisticated art like we did.

What is the first thing we do when we sit around a fire in the dead of the night? Chat, sing and dance.

To belittle arts as something somehow irrelevant or unimportant just shows a monumental ignorance and insensitivity about what is important in life.

As an example when people in Venezuela tried to tackle juvenile street crime they turned to music. If somebody like you would have been in charge "El sistema" (the program that gives kids musical instruments and instruction) would have been dumped as something unimportant. The reality is that thousands of children in Venezuela's slums have escaped a life of misery and delinquency.

But lets keep pretending that the arts,a dn music in particular, have no real benefits in our daily life.

I could go in a tirade about how sports can also be a cohesive force in society, but I would just refer you to watching the 4th goal of Brazil vs Italy in the final of the Football Worldcup in Mexico City in 1970. Only somebody monumentally blind and insensitive can't appreciate the beauty of these young men collaborating towards a final objective and how this affected positively hundreds of millions all around the world.

I wonder...

[Burning1]

How many people hesitated before clicking that link, expecting to hear: "We're no strangers to love..."

Where to start?

[jotaeleemeese]

- Twitter never was a pro Iran democracy forum. As a matter of fact nobody stopped Iranian or others to use Twitter as they see fit and I am sure it continues to be used for pro-democracy advocates.

- If you know he was a child molester, you missed his trials, where were you hiding?

- The "surgery fetish" as you ungraciously call it, may have deep psychological reasons, that most likely have to do with his childhood, which is well known wasn't a happy one.

- I am an atheist also, people like you give us a bad name. I can perfectly feel sad for the passing of an artist while not forgetting the needy in the world. Multitask man, multitask.

- You are too sensitive, the problems of the world are not going to be solved by ignoring the death of a talented individual.

New sig for all

[Xandar01]

This is good enough to be a sig!

Re:Wikipedia article - More info

[saibot834]

More info about the Wikipedia downtime in the Wikimedia Techblog: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/06/current-events/

Ironically, at the moment all blogs of the Wikimedia Foundation are down as well... unfortunately, I can't find a cached version around. Try later.

Snap out of it.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

An example of music made by sound Engineers. Yeah, he took overdubbing to the next level. Not very impressive in my book.

Well, that says something neither good or bad about your taste, but stop imposing it on everybody else.

Re:Snap out of it.

[MightyMartian]

And, to be honest with you, I don't really see the validity of the complaint. I mean, if sound processing is so evil, then you'd better go back and start mouthing off about how the Beatles and the Beach Boys during the mid-60s were doing all kinds of strange things in the studio. Strawberry fields is heavily processed, and includes two takes, one of them which had to heavy modifications to fit with the other. The Beach Boys' Good Vibrations was recorded at several studios in pieces and edited together.

Musicians had been using the studio like that for the better part of 20 years when Thriller came out. We wouldn't have Sgt. Pepper or Queen's A Night At The Opera or The Who's Who's Next if it weren't for a considerable amount of sound processing and engineering. I'm not sure what exactly in Thriller, in the respect of the recording and mixing process, the parent is even referring to. This was before digital recording, so it was still recorded on analog tape by analog desks with real live musicians.

I listened to Billie Jean and Thriller last night, and I don't hear anything that sounds insanely produced, no worse than, say, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds or Baba O'Reilly. It's not my kind of music (I'm more the FM Classic Rock type), but I'd have to say that from my limited knowledge of dance music, you're average Abba record probably involved far more sound engineering. Most certainly Queen during their mid-period were literally overdubbing vocals dozens of times to achieve the operatic section of Bohemian Rhapsody, and they weren't the only guys doing that. Pink Floyd probably has some of the most elaborate productions in the pre-digital age with Dark Side of the Moon.

Frankly, I think the parent is just talking out of his ass.

Charlie's Angel died yesterday too

[SL Baur]

That and, why the hell is some washed up, potentially pedophile, pop-star dying more important than anything else in the world right now?

What does it matter to you? Just asking.

I'm rather sad that Farrah Fawcett's passing didn't get a mention. I, for one, welcomed my beautiful blonde, swimsuited overlord by having her poster up in my bedroom when I was in jr. high school.

I feel very old right now.

Re:Charlie's Angel died yesterday too

[Omestes]

What does it matter to you? Just asking.

It matters to me because I tried to watch television news yesterday. Iran was solved, we no longer are in Iraq, no republicans are cheating on their wives, all of our privacy and rights problems were solved, though... At least as far as the news reported yesterday.

How the hell is a pop singer dying (somewhat predictably) more important than... well... anything else?

Its like when Reagan died, and someone much more important and interesting died the next day. Never heard about the person I care about, but got to hear about some crooked, annoying, washed up politician instead.

Just before...

[Anonymous Coward]

...they proof that Hawking radiation does not exist. And that thus the LHC does create a freakin' black hole which wipes us out.

Muhahaha, what a laugh he would have.

Mod me funny
Laugh
 
(or post this to some conspiracy nuts forum :)

Paedofinder General!

[lptport1]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaUkt59vY1Q

The 80s weren't bad at all

[Stu Charlton]

Don't forget Skinny Puppy. There wouldn't have been a Pretty Hate Machine without them, and I'm pretty sure "Down In It" was Trent's Ode to "Dig It" ;-)

Also, for metal fans, there were..
Faith No More
Metallica
Slayer
Iron Maiden (w/ Dickinson)
Celtic Frost
Bathory
Voivod

All hugely influential...

Working as intended

[Stu Charlton]

Twitter Creator On Iran: 'I Never Intended For Twitter To Be Useful'

SAN FRANCISCO--Creator Jack Dorsey was shocked and saddened this week after learning that his social networking device, Twitter, was being used to disseminate pertinent and timely information during the recent civil unrest in Iran. "Twitter was intended to be a way for vacant, self-absorbed egotists to share their most banal and idiotic thoughts with anyone pathetic enough to read them," said a visibly confused Dorsey, claiming that Twitter is at its most powerful when it makes an already attention-starved populace even more needy for constant affirmation. ... (click link to read the rest)