I am eagerly awaiting the first reports of abuse. For example, how long until a Muslim, Buddhist, or Atheist website is marked as "objectionable"? How about Spongebob Squarepants' homepage (he's in a gay relationship with that starfish, ya know). Or randomly blocking Liberal blogs or politician website, since we simply must protect children from abhorrent ideas like class equality.
You don't need a service to extract the audio.from a YouTube stream
While I have no objection to anyone doing this themselves for the convenience etc, I DO object to someone trying to extract $$$ from something that is not his.
You mean like Google making advertisement money off of songs being uploaded to Youtube as "movies" that are single static images, usually with the intent for Youtube MP3 Ripper sites to rip said songs to MP3 format?
I agree, totally unethical behavior and I object wholeheartedly.
This also works with unpopular opinions and content.
Case in point, Recently SomethingAwful's harassment of the TVTropes website reached a head when they started attacking TVTropes by complaining to Google about Trope pages that had odd content. The example was "Naughty Tentacles" which was the cliche of tentacles in anime tending towards being somewhat risque even in non-risque works. Google pulled all advertisements from their site until this page was removed and cut all their advertising money.
The catch being that Naughty Tentacles and other "Not Safe For Google" pages were not serving Google Ads, which means that Google is now claiming that if you have an Ad Sense ad on a SINGLE page then Google has editorial rights on ALL pages on your site.
That sick feeling in your stomach is normal, it merely means you are wise enough to realize what a huge disaster this could possibly be.
(Not to say that TVTropes handled it well themselves. The administrator had a very public nervous breakdown over the whole thing, began harassing anyone who posted Japanese media tropes, tried to argue that Romeo and Juliet was child pornography because R&J are both 14, etc etc... Many people, including myself, were publicly banned and our names dragged through the mud because we disagreed with his "great porno purge" on what was supposedly a collaborative website.)
Another recent example of something similar was when the concern troll at L7World began harassing websites that hosted "Kodmo No Jikan", a very risque Japanese manga involving a precocious child abuse victim and the male teacher who is the subject of her torment (and who is attempting to save her from her abusive stepfather). While the content is... as close to pornographic as possible without actually reaching that point, the fact of the matter is the L7World troll used as many "fainting couch" attacks he could, including photoshopping things out of context and directly attacking the Advertisers that went through Google, to harass every manga hosting website he could. (He then later admitted he likes KnJ, reads it, and was just fucking with as many people as he could because he could get away with it.)
Several months later, a similar attack was done by someone claiming that all Manga hosting websites had to remove not only any works with underage characters -- but also any manga works that had Gay or Lesbian themed content, because the "web is a product of the United States, a Christian Nation, and thus they had a duty to uphold Christian morals". When this troll was ignored and banned for these frothy rants, suddenly Google was getting all kinds of complaints out of the blue about these sites and pulled their advertisement money.
This attack destroyed OneManga, severely hurt every other manga site, et cetera. Even sites that do not host manga, and are simply series database sites, such as BakaUpdates, were affected. So don't think that you're only in danger if you host Troll-Unapproved content, if you talk about things that trolls don't like, they can go through Google to attack your site now.
And before anyone takes umbrage with the "underage characters" part, I would point out that the most popular children's comic in the world, Doraemon, as well as The SImpsons technically fall under the same overreaching umbrella of what this troll was complaining about, and are not pornographic by any sense of the word.
tl;dr: In short, I find it very unsettling that Google is openly bragging about the possibility that legal trolls such as the MPAA could now use attacks that Religious fundamentalist trolls (and, in the case of SA, just plain normal trolls) have used to silence websites that they do not agree with.
Pack what's critical first. Servers. Critical networking gear. Workstations. Ignore the phones, printers and wireless gear unless you've got extra time. And good luck.
I agree. But I would prioritize slightly differently:
1. Make sure all non-critical staff are gone, and are well informed of what's going on -- where they can contact people for further information, etc. (People) 1a. Whlie you're talking to them, ask the managers of departments -- off the record, of course -- if there are any department specific, hidden fileservers that need evac. I haven't worked in an office yet that didn't have at least one. 2. Make sure all backups are offsite, preferably in a dry, fireproof safe someplace. Ideally this step happened years back, and you can roll your eyes at this one, but lets be honest -- it didn't and you can't. (Data) 3. Disconnect servers from their racks. Any data storage stuff in there takes priority. (More Data) 4. Rack mounted servers go next (Servers) 5. The rest of the server room as time allows (Networking gear)
Anything after this is probably stuff you can skip, assuming you have good fire insurance. If you don't, welp. Honestly, start thinking like a thief, prioritize things that are expensive:
Harddrives are good to try, but it's easier to just pull the towers. Aim for any high end workstations -- the secretary's machine probably shouldn't go (but be aware that they may not have followed your server file storage and there may be data on that workstation not on the server), but the guys back in marketing? Maybe that top of the line workstation with the 30" monitor may need a second look. As mentioned above, many companies will have unofficial servers hidden around or local backups of department specific stuff, make sure you ask around if you have time to see if there's a file cabinet that needs placed on a dolly.
In an absolute pinch, just use wire cutters to disconnect workstations and get them on a cart -- DVI and USB cables are cheap. Monitors are next up on the price list. Printers right afterwards.
If you do not anticipate fire actually taking out the buildling, it may be prudent to grab trash bags and cover monitors and towers with plastic instead. This will help keep any smoke or sprinkler systems from pouring on them and damaging things.
If you have a basement, or a fire proof safe, tossing stuff in it may save it if you are absolutely out of time.
There's not a single professor I know that would go for this. Especially the "web discussion" part being graded. It seems like a backdoor for publishers to try to co-opt or even replace the professors over time. "Don't hire a professor, sign a contract with us, we'll provide textbooks, grades, tests, the works, all you'll have to do is admin the system on your end."
"Cloud Classrooms", if you will.
Several professors do like the WebAssign style online homework systems, but only because TAs are at a premium in my area.
Fortunately them patenting it means that in effect it will kill the chances of it being used en mass.
Hopefully it will be a peaceful revolution like the Revolution of 1800.
It will far more likely be one of two things:
1. The Singularity comes, and we're all too busy to deal with stupid, stupid people anymore. ("Copyright violation? You idiot, I downloaded a simulated copy of Mozart's mind last night, I don't need copyrighted files, we can all right our own music now.") 2. The economy will collapse rather rapidly, making most of this a moot point. (Disastrous climate change or peak oil being the two main contenders here.)
And of course, in my haste to write this, I spelled "Write our own music" as "Right our own music." Dear lord. And in a sentence mocking stupid people, no less. In my defense, I made the mistake of opening a political blog or four today, and my mind feels like I took a few haymakers to the fuzzy banana Snuffleupagus.
Hopefully it will be a peaceful revolution like the Revolution of 1800.
It will far more likely be one of two things:
1. The Singularity comes, and we're all too busy to deal with stupid, stupid people anymore. ("Copyright violation? You idiot, I downloaded a simulated copy of Mozart's mind last night, I don't need copyrighted files, we can all right our own music now.") 2. The economy will collapse rather rapidly, making most of this a moot point. (Disastrous climate change or peak oil being the two main contenders here.)
A police officer can't break into your room to steal cocaine as evidence against you.
What makes you say that? I don't see any reason why they can't. Perhaps you meant that they are not supposed to break into your house. In theory. In practice they can easily get away with doing so. And they don't need your cocaine. They can plant their own. Or shoot you in the face and then plant their own. The whole reason they became cops is to be able to do stuff like that and get away with it.
I may be wrong, but I believe them breaking into your house to steal evidence counts as "fruit of a poisoned tree." If they do, it and you can prove it, their case is completely destroyed.
You know that old saying "two wrongs don't make a right"?
A police officer can't break into your room to steal cocaine as evidence against you. Sure, you're breaking the law, but so did law enforcement.
Yeah. (Oh, and I don't see anyone here regularly saying "there's nothing at all wrong with downloading movies for free", troll. In fact, most posters agree to some degree about copyright. What we have problems with are the specifics of the laws, the methods used to enforce them, and the double standard in which they are enforced.)
Random thought: Wouldn't it be hilarious if NZ uses this as a justification to declare a mistrial and throw the whole thing out? After all, Dotcom's civil rights have been disgustingly violated -- not only in this instance, but his valid, legal business was intentionally destroyed to make a political point (namely: "We don't need SOPA to ruin your lives, nerds").
There also were the rather convincing arguments that the whole thing was actually a ploy to make sure Megaupload didn't branch out into the Music Publishing business -- with Internet publishing coming into it's own, a site like Megaupload could have really done some damage to the RIAA and MPAA's monopolies.
Wait, the MPAA is claiming the Megaupload EULA/TOS as a reason why people shouldn't get their data back? That's kinda a dick move.
Also, if I was the NZ government, I would be asking FedEx some pretty hard questions. Like: "Considering that you helped a foreign power conspire to break NZ law, why should we allow you to continue to work in our country?"
Um, no, The annual deficit may be smaller, but the debt is definitely bigger. That said, given the circumstances in 2008-2009, even if Jesus Christ somehow had been resurrected and been elected POTUS, "He" wouldn't have been able to turn the US budget back into a surplus and start paying down the debt.
Jesus Christ would have never been elected POTUS -- too Liberal. Turn the other cheek? That just means he's weak on crime. And that whole take care of the sick and the poor thing? Socialism...
Now, if we're talking about mythological figures that may or may not get elected, I have to say that Thor or Osiris would be my pick. They'd have this place cleaned up in no time!
And I could say you guys gave us GWB, but then "someone" voted for him... twice.
GWB was actually from Connecticut. He bought the Texas property purely as a political prop, and sold it the second he was out of office. The entire thing was social engineering, designed to make rural and lower class people empathize with him, instead of realizing he's just an embarrassing brat from a New England, old money family.
Why Slashdot hasn't migrated to a modern standard such as BBCode is beyond me, but oh well. It is what it is.
BBCode would allow users to include all those inline images, emoticons, embedded media player links, etc, which would be an absolute nightmare for Slashdot to police. The meme explosion would become enormous, and the bandwidth and server-side horsepower consumed would increase a few orders of magnitude. That's what Slashdot cannot use a fully-featured forum software, and must roll it's own stripped-down code that conserves bandwidth and server resources.
Because if we implement a standard, we have to implement the entire standard, right? And there's never been a BBCode enabled board in the history of the Internet that disabled images?
I mean, HTML supports the IMG tag, so therefore anyone can just insert an image or a frame or whatnot into their Slashdot posts.... right?
BBCode is hardly modern - been around for a long time. The only advantage to BBCode is that it's slightly easier to use than HTML. Otherwise it's the same damn thing in principle.
BTW, you seemed to have a boo boo in your own HTML which is funny.
Close. I was spacing out the HTML with spaces in between the brackets, which in theory would break it from HTML and make it an example, right? Well, no, the comments system thought it was smarter than I and "fixed" it into that mess above.
Even the basic premise doesn't stand up to a cursory glance. In order to use cloud computing people are going to need computers, which are going to need er, support. Doesn't matter what they are being used for, its the same machines.
Yes, but if the support is lowered to "Swap out dumb terminals when they're broken and call Dell for hardware swaps" then you can do that with 1, 2 guys. If the OS and all the apps are hosted and served up remotely......Actually...
This isn't anything new, is it? Dumb terminals have been around for decades and didn't end the desktop. Every few years they come up with a new term for it -- this time it's apparently "Cloud Computing" -- and the tech pundits, hoping for clicks, talk about how it's going to be the year of the post-desktop.
So, captain James Kirk making out with scantily clad alien chicks on a spaceship with an all male crew stuck there for months (hallo, sailor!) doesn't have porn overtones, but captain Jane Kirk making out with scantily clad alien hunks on a spaceship with all female crew does?..
Yes. Because the former is a power fantasy for most of Star Trek's audience, the latter is the same exact thing (as you are quick to point out) but -- and here is the rub -- it's no longer a power fantasy for the adolescent or socially and emotionally stunted geek crowd that would find the former satisfying.
Now, having said that, I would love to see that show, if only to see how uncomfortable it would make the average geek feel.
Or how about this: How about a Star Trek where the Captain is married, with children. (No Al Bundy jokes, please -- although hell, I'd watch it.) That would be an interesting dynamic, I think -- seeing how the Captain balances the needs of his crew vs the needs of his family, his work and home life, etc.
Isn't that reason enough? What happened to ambition, curiosity, and doing things "because it's there?"
It got buried under quarterly budget reports and two generations of short sighted politicians whose only motivation is to get themselves reelected and to push a hyperpartisan agenda.
Oh, and Democrats, who are generally worthless at any form of argument or debate.
Only if their prints are on file. If everyone is chipped at birth, their chip ID will certainly be on file from birth.
I look forward to the day this happens, because 5 minutes later I'll use an Xacto knife to remove the stupid chip and replace it with a spoofed copy of, oh, lets say Elizabeth Moon's. Or perhaps a made up one, I'm thinking Papa Smurf or perhaps Gargamel.
If nothing else, jam a Microwave door open, shove your chipped appendage in, and hit the +1 minute button two times. Fries electronics quite effectively.
I suppose as far as Science Fiction writers crazy ideas goes, this isn't nearly as bad as Xenu.
A good point. But technically Comcast isn't lying.
Comcast considers someone who uses Hulu once a night and streams Pandora / Spotify all day while they're working to be the exact same as a Grandma who only turns on the PC once a week to check their "E Mailbox." That skews the numbers WILDLY downward -- and they know it.
Around 2008, my local ISP was formed. Sometime around 2009 they implemented data caps of 600 MB/day, as most users didn't exceed that amount. Today, the cap is exactly the same as was first implemented.
300 GB might seem like a lot right now. Give it a few years...
Comcast, Verizon, etc -- they're all banking their entire futures on this very idea. They're hoping to get in a reasonable -- for now -- cap, and then in 5 years when our bandwidth usage is way more commonplace, welp, their hope is to get us right around the $50 a month mark... and $50ish in over usage fees a month, every month, until some external market force economically forces them to stop.
Think about it. In 5-10 years, we won't have Cable, we'll have HD Video on Demand Networks, something like Hulu or Netflix instead.
Imagine when Hulu (or rather, a Hulu competitor, since Hulu has been compromised) gets the bright idea to make "channels" where you get X number of shows at differing points of the day, all streaming via a Roku box or something similar, with the option to switch back and forth in the channel's timeline if you want. All the benefits of a standard Cable Channel for Mom and Pop ("The news is on at 7, then it's Cops, and Letterman"), with all the benefits of Video on Demand ("We missed Cops, we'll watch it right now and Letterman later tonight").
Sounds great, right? Well, it won't be once you get the $50 a month ISP bill + $50 a month Overusage bill, every month, for the rest of your life. Which the Bandwidth Middlemen are literally banking their futures on.
It is their right to petition service providers to give them better service. It is most assuredly their right, and perhaps even their duty, to use their money to speak for them in this matter. Welcome to capitalism, please learn how it works or shut up and die.
Except that doesn't work when there are only 1-2 providers in an area due to a Government supported monopoly on service. When your "using your money to speak for yourself" involves accepting their terms or going without, welp, that's not really a choice now, is it?
Slashdot Mirror
I am eagerly awaiting the first reports of abuse. For example, how long until a Muslim, Buddhist, or Atheist website is marked as "objectionable"? How about Spongebob Squarepants' homepage (he's in a gay relationship with that starfish, ya know). Or randomly blocking Liberal blogs or politician website, since we simply must protect children from abhorrent ideas like class equality.
I think you left out the part where google has paid the actual content owners for the right to make advertising money off of those songs.
Really? So just as a quick off the cuff example, Google paid Shoji Meguro and Atlus for the rights for this rip of the Persona 4 OST?
Well, ya learn something new every day!
This is sofa king lame.
You don't need a service to extract the audio.from a YouTube stream
While I have no objection to anyone doing this themselves for the convenience etc, I DO object to someone trying to extract $$$ from something that is not his .
You mean like Google making advertisement money off of songs being uploaded to Youtube as "movies" that are single static images, usually with the intent for Youtube MP3 Ripper sites to rip said songs to MP3 format?
I agree, totally unethical behavior and I object wholeheartedly.
This also works with unpopular opinions and content.
Case in point, Recently SomethingAwful's harassment of the TVTropes website reached a head when they started attacking TVTropes by complaining to Google about Trope pages that had odd content. The example was "Naughty Tentacles" which was the cliche of tentacles in anime tending towards being somewhat risque even in non-risque works. Google pulled all advertisements from their site until this page was removed and cut all their advertising money.
The catch being that Naughty Tentacles and other "Not Safe For Google" pages were not serving Google Ads, which means that Google is now claiming that if you have an Ad Sense ad on a SINGLE page then Google has editorial rights on ALL pages on your site.
That sick feeling in your stomach is normal, it merely means you are wise enough to realize what a huge disaster this could possibly be.
(Not to say that TVTropes handled it well themselves. The administrator had a very public nervous breakdown over the whole thing, began harassing anyone who posted Japanese media tropes, tried to argue that Romeo and Juliet was child pornography because R&J are both 14, etc etc... Many people, including myself, were publicly banned and our names dragged through the mud because we disagreed with his "great porno purge" on what was supposedly a collaborative website.)
Another recent example of something similar was when the concern troll at L7World began harassing websites that hosted "Kodmo No Jikan", a very risque Japanese manga involving a precocious child abuse victim and the male teacher who is the subject of her torment (and who is attempting to save her from her abusive stepfather). While the content is... as close to pornographic as possible without actually reaching that point, the fact of the matter is the L7World troll used as many "fainting couch" attacks he could, including photoshopping things out of context and directly attacking the Advertisers that went through Google, to harass every manga hosting website he could. (He then later admitted he likes KnJ, reads it, and was just fucking with as many people as he could because he could get away with it.)
Several months later, a similar attack was done by someone claiming that all Manga hosting websites had to remove not only any works with underage characters -- but also any manga works that had Gay or Lesbian themed content, because the "web is a product of the United States, a Christian Nation, and thus they had a duty to uphold Christian morals". When this troll was ignored and banned for these frothy rants, suddenly Google was getting all kinds of complaints out of the blue about these sites and pulled their advertisement money.
This attack destroyed OneManga, severely hurt every other manga site, et cetera. Even sites that do not host manga, and are simply series database sites, such as BakaUpdates, were affected. So don't think that you're only in danger if you host Troll-Unapproved content, if you talk about things that trolls don't like, they can go through Google to attack your site now.
And before anyone takes umbrage with the "underage characters" part, I would point out that the most popular children's comic in the world, Doraemon, as well as The SImpsons technically fall under the same overreaching umbrella of what this troll was complaining about, and are not pornographic by any sense of the word.
tl;dr: In short, I find it very unsettling that Google is openly bragging about the possibility that legal trolls such as the MPAA could now use attacks that Religious fundamentalist trolls (and, in the case of SA, just plain normal trolls) have used to silence websites that they do not agree with.
Pack what's critical first. Servers. Critical networking gear. Workstations. Ignore the phones, printers and wireless gear unless you've got extra time. And good luck.
I agree. But I would prioritize slightly differently:
1. Make sure all non-critical staff are gone, and are well informed of what's going on -- where they can contact people for further information, etc. (People)
1a. Whlie you're talking to them, ask the managers of departments -- off the record, of course -- if there are any department specific, hidden fileservers that need evac. I haven't worked in an office yet that didn't have at least one.
2. Make sure all backups are offsite, preferably in a dry, fireproof safe someplace. Ideally this step happened years back, and you can roll your eyes at this one, but lets be honest -- it didn't and you can't. (Data)
3. Disconnect servers from their racks. Any data storage stuff in there takes priority. (More Data)
4. Rack mounted servers go next (Servers)
5. The rest of the server room as time allows (Networking gear)
Anything after this is probably stuff you can skip, assuming you have good fire insurance. If you don't, welp. Honestly, start thinking like a thief, prioritize things that are expensive:
Harddrives are good to try, but it's easier to just pull the towers. Aim for any high end workstations -- the secretary's machine probably shouldn't go (but be aware that they may not have followed your server file storage and there may be data on that workstation not on the server), but the guys back in marketing? Maybe that top of the line workstation with the 30" monitor may need a second look. As mentioned above, many companies will have unofficial servers hidden around or local backups of department specific stuff, make sure you ask around if you have time to see if there's a file cabinet that needs placed on a dolly.
In an absolute pinch, just use wire cutters to disconnect workstations and get them on a cart -- DVI and USB cables are cheap. Monitors are next up on the price list. Printers right afterwards.
If you do not anticipate fire actually taking out the buildling, it may be prudent to grab trash bags and cover monitors and towers with plastic instead. This will help keep any smoke or sprinkler systems from pouring on them and damaging things.
If you have a basement, or a fire proof safe, tossing stuff in it may save it if you are absolutely out of time.
There's not a single professor I know that would go for this. Especially the "web discussion" part being graded. It seems like a backdoor for publishers to try to co-opt or even replace the professors over time. "Don't hire a professor, sign a contract with us, we'll provide textbooks, grades, tests, the works, all you'll have to do is admin the system on your end."
"Cloud Classrooms", if you will.
Several professors do like the WebAssign style online homework systems, but only because TAs are at a premium in my area.
Fortunately them patenting it means that in effect it will kill the chances of it being used en mass.
Hopefully it will be a peaceful revolution like the Revolution of 1800.
It will far more likely be one of two things:
1. The Singularity comes, and we're all too busy to deal with stupid, stupid people anymore. ("Copyright violation? You idiot, I downloaded a simulated copy of Mozart's mind last night, I don't need copyrighted files, we can all right our own music now.")
2. The economy will collapse rather rapidly, making most of this a moot point. (Disastrous climate change or peak oil being the two main contenders here.)
And of course, in my haste to write this, I spelled "Write our own music" as "Right our own music." Dear lord. And in a sentence mocking stupid people, no less. In my defense, I made the mistake of opening a political blog or four today, and my mind feels like I took a few haymakers to the fuzzy banana Snuffleupagus.
Hopefully it will be a peaceful revolution like the Revolution of 1800.
It will far more likely be one of two things:
1. The Singularity comes, and we're all too busy to deal with stupid, stupid people anymore. ("Copyright violation? You idiot, I downloaded a simulated copy of Mozart's mind last night, I don't need copyrighted files, we can all right our own music now.")
2. The economy will collapse rather rapidly, making most of this a moot point. (Disastrous climate change or peak oil being the two main contenders here.)
A police officer can't break into your room to steal cocaine as evidence against you.
What makes you say that? I don't see any reason why they can't. Perhaps you meant that they are not supposed to break into your house. In theory. In practice they can easily get away with doing so. And they don't need your cocaine. They can plant their own. Or shoot you in the face and then plant their own. The whole reason they became cops is to be able to do stuff like that and get away with it.
I may be wrong, but I believe them breaking into your house to steal evidence counts as "fruit of a poisoned tree." If they do, it and you can prove it, their case is completely destroyed.
You know that old saying "two wrongs don't make a right"?
A police officer can't break into your room to steal cocaine as evidence against you. Sure, you're breaking the law, but so did law enforcement.
Yeah. (Oh, and I don't see anyone here regularly saying "there's nothing at all wrong with downloading movies for free", troll. In fact, most posters agree to some degree about copyright. What we have problems with are the specifics of the laws, the methods used to enforce them, and the double standard in which they are enforced.)
Random thought: Wouldn't it be hilarious if NZ uses this as a justification to declare a mistrial and throw the whole thing out? After all, Dotcom's civil rights have been disgustingly violated -- not only in this instance, but his valid, legal business was intentionally destroyed to make a political point (namely: "We don't need SOPA to ruin your lives, nerds").
There also were the rather convincing arguments that the whole thing was actually a ploy to make sure Megaupload didn't branch out into the Music Publishing business -- with Internet publishing coming into it's own, a site like Megaupload could have really done some damage to the RIAA and MPAA's monopolies.
Wait, the MPAA is claiming the Megaupload EULA/TOS as a reason why people shouldn't get their data back? That's kinda a dick move.
Also, if I was the NZ government, I would be asking FedEx some pretty hard questions. Like: "Considering that you helped a foreign power conspire to break NZ law, why should we allow you to continue to work in our country?"
Um, no, The annual deficit may be smaller, but the debt is definitely bigger. That said, given the circumstances in 2008-2009, even if Jesus Christ somehow had been resurrected and been elected POTUS, "He" wouldn't have been able to turn the US budget back into a surplus and start paying down the debt.
Jesus Christ would have never been elected POTUS -- too Liberal. Turn the other cheek? That just means he's weak on crime. And that whole take care of the sick and the poor thing? Socialism...
Now, if we're talking about mythological figures that may or may not get elected, I have to say that Thor or Osiris would be my pick. They'd have this place cleaned up in no time!
And I could say you guys gave us GWB, but then "someone" voted for him... twice.
GWB was actually from Connecticut. He bought the Texas property purely as a political prop, and sold it the second he was out of office. The entire thing was social engineering, designed to make rural and lower class people empathize with him, instead of realizing he's just an embarrassing brat from a New England, old money family.
Why Slashdot hasn't migrated to a modern standard such as BBCode is beyond me, but oh well. It is what it is.
BBCode would allow users to include all those inline images, emoticons, embedded media player links, etc, which would be an absolute nightmare for Slashdot to police. The meme explosion would become enormous, and the bandwidth and server-side horsepower consumed would increase a few orders of magnitude. That's what Slashdot cannot use a fully-featured forum software, and must roll it's own stripped-down code that conserves bandwidth and server resources.
Because if we implement a standard, we have to implement the entire standard, right? And there's never been a BBCode enabled board in the history of the Internet that disabled images?
I mean, HTML supports the IMG tag, so therefore anyone can just insert an image or a frame or whatnot into their Slashdot posts.... right?
BBCode is hardly modern - been around for a long time. The only advantage to BBCode is that it's slightly easier to use than HTML. Otherwise it's the same damn thing in principle.
BTW, you seemed to have a boo boo in your own HTML which is funny.
Close. I was spacing out the HTML with spaces in between the brackets, which in theory would break it from HTML and make it an example, right? Well, no, the comments system thought it was smarter than I and "fixed" it into that mess above.
Standard HTML works. In this case, you're looking for text .
Why Slashdot hasn't migrated to a modern standard such as BBCode is beyond me, but oh well. It is what it is.
Even the basic premise doesn't stand up to a cursory glance. In order to use cloud computing people are going to need computers, which are going to need er, support. Doesn't matter what they are being used for, its the same machines.
Yes, but if the support is lowered to "Swap out dumb terminals when they're broken and call Dell for hardware swaps" then you can do that with 1, 2 guys. If the OS and all the apps are hosted and served up remotely... ...Actually...
This isn't anything new, is it? Dumb terminals have been around for decades and didn't end the desktop. Every few years they come up with a new term for it -- this time it's apparently "Cloud Computing" -- and the tech pundits, hoping for clicks, talk about how it's going to be the year of the post-desktop.
"Although in practice we can expect a dumbing down of the user base too :)."
Does IQ measurement go below zero?
Yes.
So, captain James Kirk making out with scantily clad alien chicks on a spaceship with an all male crew stuck there for months (hallo, sailor!) doesn't have porn overtones, but captain Jane Kirk making out with scantily clad alien hunks on a spaceship with all female crew does?..
Yes. Because the former is a power fantasy for most of Star Trek's audience, the latter is the same exact thing (as you are quick to point out) but -- and here is the rub -- it's no longer a power fantasy for the adolescent or socially and emotionally stunted geek crowd that would find the former satisfying.
Now, having said that, I would love to see that show, if only to see how uncomfortable it would make the average geek feel.
Or how about this: How about a Star Trek where the Captain is married, with children. (No Al Bundy jokes, please -- although hell, I'd watch it.) That would be an interesting dynamic, I think -- seeing how the Captain balances the needs of his crew vs the needs of his family, his work and home life, etc.
Isn't that reason enough? What happened to ambition, curiosity, and doing things "because it's there?"
It got buried under quarterly budget reports and two generations of short sighted politicians whose only motivation is to get themselves reelected and to push a hyperpartisan agenda.
Oh, and Democrats, who are generally worthless at any form of argument or debate.
Only if their prints are on file. If everyone is chipped at birth, their chip ID will certainly be on file from birth.
I look forward to the day this happens, because 5 minutes later I'll use an Xacto knife to remove the stupid chip and replace it with a spoofed copy of, oh, lets say Elizabeth Moon's. Or perhaps a made up one, I'm thinking Papa Smurf or perhaps Gargamel.
If nothing else, jam a Microwave door open, shove your chipped appendage in, and hit the +1 minute button two times. Fries electronics quite effectively.
I suppose as far as Science Fiction writers crazy ideas goes, this isn't nearly as bad as Xenu.
Consider your source.
A good point. But technically Comcast isn't lying.
Comcast considers someone who uses Hulu once a night and streams Pandora / Spotify all day while they're working to be the exact same as a Grandma who only turns on the PC once a week to check their "E Mailbox." That skews the numbers WILDLY downward -- and they know it.
Around 2008, my local ISP was formed. Sometime around 2009 they implemented data caps of 600 MB/day, as most users didn't exceed that amount. Today, the cap is exactly the same as was first implemented.
300 GB might seem like a lot right now. Give it a few years...
Comcast, Verizon, etc -- they're all banking their entire futures on this very idea. They're hoping to get in a reasonable -- for now -- cap, and then in 5 years when our bandwidth usage is way more commonplace, welp, their hope is to get us right around the $50 a month mark... and $50ish in over usage fees a month, every month, until some external market force economically forces them to stop.
Think about it. In 5-10 years, we won't have Cable, we'll have HD Video on Demand Networks, something like Hulu or Netflix instead.
Imagine when Hulu (or rather, a Hulu competitor, since Hulu has been compromised) gets the bright idea to make "channels" where you get X number of shows at differing points of the day, all streaming via a Roku box or something similar, with the option to switch back and forth in the channel's timeline if you want. All the benefits of a standard Cable Channel for Mom and Pop ("The news is on at 7, then it's Cops, and Letterman"), with all the benefits of Video on Demand ("We missed Cops, we'll watch it right now and Letterman later tonight").
Sounds great, right? Well, it won't be once you get the $50 a month ISP bill + $50 a month Overusage bill, every month, for the rest of your life. Which the Bandwidth Middlemen are literally banking their futures on.
It is their right to petition service providers to give them better service. It is most assuredly their right, and perhaps even their duty, to use their money to speak for them in this matter. Welcome to capitalism, please learn how it works or shut up and die.
Except that doesn't work when there are only 1-2 providers in an area due to a Government supported monopoly on service. When your "using your money to speak for yourself" involves accepting their terms or going without, welp, that's not really a choice now, is it?
Global capital? How do we vote them out of office?
Traditionally, With Torches and Pitchforks.