Of course, the whole "french fries" fiasco was even funnier considering that french fries aren't even named after France - it's the way they're prepared that gave them their name, and the word just happens to be the same in (contemporary?) English.
Well, if you're not looking for a particular outcome, then it'll at least be easier for you to actually get to grips with unexpected outcomes instead of modifying the study until the results suit you - I think that's something that's a definite risk if you get paid by one side. Even when you still try to be objective, and even when you don't get any pressure whatsoever (explicit or implied) to come to a certain conclusion, I don't think you can truly be objective if one side is paying you.
When you're not being paid, though, it is possible. Take a look at science, for example; if you replace "study" with "experiment", you'll see that the whole thing isn't much different really, and in science, most people manage to be at least reasonably objective. You may already have an idea about how things work (that is, you may already have a scientific theory); but if you do an experiment and the results don't fit into your theory, then you'll most likely modify the theory until it works again. (Or you might even throw it away altogether, but I think that's less common.)
Of course, some scientists don't manage to do that and instead get so attached to a particular theory (for whatever reason) or come to dislike a new theory so much that they simply reject it on emotional grounds, without a real, rational, scientific reason. This is unfortunate, but it's not the norm - most scientists manage to be objective.
A good example might be Einstein and the "spooky action at a distance". Did he dislike it? Certainly. Did he think it couldn't be something that actually occured in reality? You betcha. But he didn't reject quantum mechanics because of it; rather, he tried to find a way to modify QM to get rid of what he believed was an artifact.
Of course, we nowadays pretty much know (to the extent that you can truly positively "know" something in science) that he was incorrect and that SAAAD really exists. But the point is that Einstein, while he did not like the idea of SAAAD, reacted in a scientific fashion instead of resorting to dirtier tactics like spreading FUD, buying studies, and all that, which unfortunately seems to be all too common outside of the scientific community.
Regarding Mr. Thompson, I'm not sure if he's a man of questionable ethics who doesn't mind creating a study that comes to a predetermined result if the money is right, or if he is naive enough to truly believe that he can be objective in a study commissioned by and paid for by Microsoft.
And just to make it clear, I don't want to comment on the findings of the study as such at all. I do have my own opinion, of course (Linux/Unix rox, Windows sux, and yes, I've used both for more than a decade), but I don't know exactly what question the study was supposed to evaluate, so I can't comment on it, naturally. I just think that the methodology in this case is rather fishy - praise for company A paid for by company A always is, even if it should be well-deserved.
Yes, that makes sense. If you leave your front door unlocked, at least make sure that your windows (no pun intended) are secure - it'll make you feel so much better when the thieves enter your house through the front door and steal all your stuff.
Actually... he's not even maintaining 2.6. He's maintaining -mm, which is kind of like the development branch where patches get tested before being merged into mainline, but the vanilla 2.6 tree is maintained by Linus, and it doesn't look like that's going to change anytime soon.
There's a difference between hiding the true nature of the chip to the buyer and to the computer they're using. The former is not acceptable, but the latter is (if the buyer is aware of what they're actually buying).
"fatal1ty" is not a terribly original name, though. It *may* be that someone registered this account after reading about this guy, but it's just as possible that it's coincidence. leetspeak-ifying a common word, especially one that's both fashionable (as far as nicknames are concerned) and gaming-related, like "fatality", is not the pinnacle of creativity.
In that case, even running wouldn't be a sport. Granted, most runners don't smoke while they run, but they could, and drinking something is not uncommon if you run over longer distances, either.
It may be just me, but I think you're reading too much into a Netcraft report here. Outside of the fact that FreeBSD and Linux seem to be about equally present here, the platform on which the projects's *website* is hosted doesn't say anything about the platform the project itself is developed on.
Case in point: openbsd.org is hosted on Solaris. Does that mean that OpenBSD is primarily developed on Solaris? Of course not. And the same thing goes for Apache, too. It's still possible that Apache is primarily developed on FreeBSD, of course, but a Netcraft report doesn't say anything about whether it is.
It does make sense to use it for testing purposes, though. Just think about it: if they had used Star Wars or something, then it would've been a matter of hours until a copy had popped up on ThePirateBay or so. With a movie like this, they're probably pretty safe from copyright infringement - I doubt anyone who has access to it now would *want* to copy it. Heck, they probably have to pay people a bonus just so that they'll watch it when testing the players.
Actually, after RTFA, I think that the reason he was not allowed to leave the room right away was not that he had wrapped his RFID badge in foil, but rather that he had (jokingly) talked about killing another participant.
Of course, everyone with common sense would've realised it was just a joke, but security people tend to take these things seriously.
This was posted by CowboyNeal, though, while the last article was posted by Zonk. Surely you don't expect the editors to actually read Slashdot instead of mechanically clicking on "Publish"?
Because that would essentially be the same thing as preinstalling it. A novice user who doesn't realise that there are alternative media players or who is too lazy to look for them and install them will just click "OK" when presented with a dialog along the lines of "In order to watch this video, you need to install Windows Media Player(tm). Would you like to automatically install it?", so the problem would still be the same in that case.
Contrary to what one might think, after all, this ruling is not *directly* about end-users - it's about giving competitors a fair chance, first and foremost (which will then indirectly lead to a better end-user experience as well). As long as Windows Media Player can be installed in some "priviledged" way (that is, as long as it's not just "download this package from microsoft.com and install it manually, like you would with any other media player"), the problem will subsist.
The dimension of a subspace is the minimum number of vectors that span said subspace, yes (at least, that's one definition of several equivalent ones), but you have to show that that minimum is actually well-defined - for example, there is no a priori reason why I couldn't find one set of four linearly independent vectors that span said subspace and another set of five, where neither set spans the entire subspace anymore if I remove one of the vectors. In this example, it would not be clear whether the dimension of the subspace should be four or five.
This really cannot happen, but it's important to realise that you need to prove this, as it doesn't immediately follow from the definition - you need Steinitz for this (or you could use the more general ultrafilter lemma, too).:)
Bitrate, OK... frequency, OK... but codec? They're *MP3s*, for goodness' sake. MP3 is not a container format like Ogg, it *is* the codec. I'm sorry, but I'll have to confiscate your geek license now.:)
What is the regular definition of "dimension", though? The dimension of a vector space at least is not the most basic concept you'll come across in that field - it's not immediately clear why you couldn't have two bases with different cardinality, for example. Or, for that matter, it's not immediately clear why there has to be a basis at all (and in fact, you have to use the axiom of choice to prove that this is always the case; if you don't accept it, there are vector spaces without a basis and thus without a defined number of dimensions, strange as that may sound).
And the Hausdorff dimension isn't really better, either.
Of course, all these things are basic (or at least easily grokkable) for a mathematician, but for laypeople, they may not really mean anything. I remember giving a talk about fractals and the fractal dimension in my math class at school once, in the last year, but most people couldn't even accept the fact that a dimension might not be an integer. For them, a dimension was not something you could define, but rather something that existed, in the sense that we have three (or four, if you count time) dimensions we live in, and nothing else. I doubt they would've been comfortable with hearing about things like infinite-dimensional vectorspaces, either. And that *was* in a math class.
I've experienced it a few times, myself - when someone tells me something about a field where I have no experience or prior knowledge whatsoever and that I'm completely unfamiliar with, something that actually does require a bit of thought to understand, then I usually am able to follow them when it's explained, but I can't reproduce it afterwards - it's just too much information at once, and I'm not able to store away all the information when I have to focus on understanding how it all fits together, it seems.
It's something that goes away when I learn some of the basic concepts in a certain field, though.
Oh, that certainly - I was more talking about people like my parents. I've often tried to explain fascinating (to me) mathematical concepts to them in my university days, and they always were interested, too; I think they even managed to understand *why* these things were fascinating when I talked about them, but afterwards, they wouldn't have been able to explain things, not even without caring about the details.
*nods* Well, mathematics has its share of nutcases, too.:) Biology has creationists; physics has Gene Ray (of time cube fame - or should I say notoriety?), and mathematics has intuitionists (which, one might add, is just as stupid a moniker as "intelligent design" - I don't see anything intuitive about their approach).:)
But then, of course, this is an area where mathematics and philosophy mix, and unfortunately, the less rigorous approach of philosophy where new theories aren't based on solid proof but rather on personal reputation is influencing that area.
But luckily, it's pretty much limited to that; most mathematicians getting actual work done [1] seem to follow Dirac for the most part - "shut up and calculate".
1. On a side note, I'm not trying to rag on those working on the foundations of mathematics. Quite the opposite; I really think this is one of the most fascinating areas of mathematics, but I also think that those that endlessly debate whether "tertium non datur" should be accepted or not and similar things are just indulging in a pseudo-intellectual wankfest, not contributing anything useful.
My point was that you don't have to explain all the details in physics to give a meaningful and useful approximation of what things are like. You might not be able to explain all the details, but it often will be enough - if you are just interested in learning what water molecules look like (for example) and why they can form like this, you don't have to know about dual wave/particle nature of elementary particles. Sure, it'll become important at some later point - you can't really understand aromatic structures in chemistry without this, for example -, but for a layperson, it's good enough.
The same thing is not true in mathematics: no matter how simple a problem looks (that is, no matter how easy it is to formulate), the solution can be arbitrarily complex. Why can there be no natural numbers a, b, c (greater than 0) such that a^3 + b^3 = c^3? It's a question that everyone can understand, yet the solution is too complex even for most mathematicians to understand (I have a background in mathematics, and I tried to read it once; I had to stop after less than two pages or so).
Another problem with mathematics is that most people don't know the basic building blocks of mathematics. I think most reasonably intelligent people have a general idea of what molecules are, for example, but if you start talking about functions, or spaces, or groups, you'll immediately lose most people.
Hilbert spaces don't have to be infinite-dimensional.
Outside of that... yes, that is a pretty good description of Hilbert spaces, but you'd probably lose most non-mathematicians I know by the time you said that there could be more than three dimensions.
"kept well-hidden"? Sorry, but that at least is utter rubish. No part of mathematics is kept well-hidden by anyone really; it's just that
1. the general public isn't really interested in mathematics (unlike physics, for example; most non-mathematicians I've met seem to have an instinctive averse reaction when you even say "mathematics")
2. mathematics, in general, cannot be dumbed down simplified for laypeople the same way that other natural sciences can. Someone can have a general idea of what a black hole is even when they don't understand the physical theories behind it, but how do you explain to a layperson what a Hilbert space is?
Coupled together, these things mean that the general public isn't really aware of what mathematicians even study or why it's important to them, but it's not the fault of mathematics (or mathematicians).
The same thing could be said about e-mail
on
Requiem for Usenet
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· Score: 2, Insightful
That's silly - the same thing could be said about email. I don't know about you, but I'm currently getting around 800 spam messages a day - and while most of it is caught by the filter, that's still an awful lot. Viri and invitations to "unspeakable" sexual acts (exactly what is "unspeakable", anyway? I know a lot of people who'd consider anything except missionary-style after-marriage with-the-intent-to-procreate sex to be "unspeakable", and some who'd view even *that* as unspeakable - a necessary evil) are certainly common, as are offers for cheap medication, body part enlargement and cheap M$ software, phishing, and all the other crap that gets spammed.
Would any ISP use this as an excuse to turn off email for all customers? Of course not; the thought alone is ridiculous, and I think that shows that they're just looking for a convenient scapegoat. I'm not sure what the real reason could be, but it's probably money, in one way or another - turning off news servers means less bandwidth consumption, less hardware needed at the ISP, less administration overhead (i.e., less administrators), and so on.
Given that, and also given that most people don't use seem to Usenet anymore (at least not in the traditional form, especially since web-based services like Google Groups became available), I can understand their decision to stop offering Usenet, but I wish they'd at least be honest about why they're doing so.
That's pretty much LEGO's own fault, though. I used to have tons of LEGOs as a kid, and still have some today, too (not to mention that those I had when I was younger are still stowed away in my parents' attic - I should bug them about digging them out for me again), but I almost never buy new LEGO sets.
Why? A couple of reasons, really:
1. They're unoriginal. I don't really care about Harry Potter or Star Wars sets in the slightest; I don't care about Bionicle or whatever they named that crap, either. And I don't want sets where pretty much every piece was specially designed for just that set, severely reducing its usefulness for my own creations. What I do want is original stuff where I don't feel I'm paying extra for buying a merchandising product. Which brings me to...
2. They're expensive. Really, the pricetags on LEGO sets these days are ridiculous when you consider that they're just a collection of small pieces of plastic that are manufactured with pretty much no human intervention at all (I saw a documentary on their brick factory in Denmark once; very impressive). I'm not sure LEGO was cheaper really when I was a kid (but I didn't pay for it myself back then, of course, so I wouldn't know), but it definitely is too expensive right now. Sometimes, when I see a new set that actually catches my interest, I look at the price tag and say "no, I'm definitely not paying that much".
3. They discontinued the space sets. OK, they have Star Wars now, but that's boring and unoriginal (see above); most of the original space sets (classic, Blacktron, Space Police and all that) just had that certain "special something" that's missing from LEGO sets these days.
4. LEGO does not seem to emphasise building your own stuff as much anymore as they did. I had a few LEGO books in my younger days that had wonderful ideas for what to build; these days, it seems that the company is mostly interested in churning out new sets every year, expecting everyone to buy them before they go out of production again, and never use them to build anything except for the licensed Star Wars or Harry Potter (or whatever) models. There simply doesn't seem to be any room for real imagination anymore.
That being said, I still do buy LEGO occasionally, but given the prices and the general lack of interesting models these days, it's only on eBay. So if someone from LEGO is reading this... you've lost a good customer in me, and I think that's highly unfortunate. I *like* LEGO, and I would love to buy more, but you just don't produce anything that interests me really, and you charge prices that I'm not willing to pay.
Slashdot Mirror
"given their hate for America"? o.O Wow. Talk about trolling.
Of course, the whole "french fries" fiasco was even funnier considering that french fries aren't even named after France - it's the way they're prepared that gave them their name, and the word just happens to be the same in (contemporary?) English.
Well, if you're not looking for a particular outcome, then it'll at least be easier for you to actually get to grips with unexpected outcomes instead of modifying the study until the results suit you - I think that's something that's a definite risk if you get paid by one side. Even when you still try to be objective, and even when you don't get any pressure whatsoever (explicit or implied) to come to a certain conclusion, I don't think you can truly be objective if one side is paying you.
When you're not being paid, though, it is possible. Take a look at science, for example; if you replace "study" with "experiment", you'll see that the whole thing isn't much different really, and in science, most people manage to be at least reasonably objective. You may already have an idea about how things work (that is, you may already have a scientific theory); but if you do an experiment and the results don't fit into your theory, then you'll most likely modify the theory until it works again. (Or you might even throw it away altogether, but I think that's less common.)
Of course, some scientists don't manage to do that and instead get so attached to a particular theory (for whatever reason) or come to dislike a new theory so much that they simply reject it on emotional grounds, without a real, rational, scientific reason. This is unfortunate, but it's not the norm - most scientists manage to be objective.
A good example might be Einstein and the "spooky action at a distance". Did he dislike it? Certainly. Did he think it couldn't be something that actually occured in reality? You betcha. But he didn't reject quantum mechanics because of it; rather, he tried to find a way to modify QM to get rid of what he believed was an artifact.
Of course, we nowadays pretty much know (to the extent that you can truly positively "know" something in science) that he was incorrect and that SAAAD really exists. But the point is that Einstein, while he did not like the idea of SAAAD, reacted in a scientific fashion instead of resorting to dirtier tactics like spreading FUD, buying studies, and all that, which unfortunately seems to be all too common outside of the scientific community.
Regarding Mr. Thompson, I'm not sure if he's a man of questionable ethics who doesn't mind creating a study that comes to a predetermined result if the money is right, or if he is naive enough to truly believe that he can be objective in a study commissioned by and paid for by Microsoft.
And just to make it clear, I don't want to comment on the findings of the study as such at all. I do have my own opinion, of course (Linux/Unix rox, Windows sux, and yes, I've used both for more than a decade), but I don't know exactly what question the study was supposed to evaluate, so I can't comment on it, naturally. I just think that the methodology in this case is rather fishy - praise for company A paid for by company A always is, even if it should be well-deserved.
Yes, that makes sense. If you leave your front door unlocked, at least make sure that your windows (no pun intended) are secure - it'll make you feel so much better when the thieves enter your house through the front door and steal all your stuff.
Actually... he's not even maintaining 2.6. He's maintaining -mm, which is kind of like the development branch where patches get tested before being merged into mainline, but the vanilla 2.6 tree is maintained by Linus, and it doesn't look like that's going to change anytime soon.
There's a difference between hiding the true nature of the chip to the buyer and to the computer they're using. The former is not acceptable, but the latter is (if the buyer is aware of what they're actually buying).
"fatal1ty" is not a terribly original name, though. It *may* be that someone registered this account after reading about this guy, but it's just as possible that it's coincidence. leetspeak-ifying a common word, especially one that's both fashionable (as far as nicknames are concerned) and gaming-related, like "fatality", is not the pinnacle of creativity.
In that case, even running wouldn't be a sport. Granted, most runners don't smoke while they run, but they could, and drinking something is not uncommon if you run over longer distances, either.
Not to mention SAP R/3 administration for dummies (which does, in fact, exist!) and Vertex Operator Algebras for dummies (which unfortunately doesn't).
It may be just me, but I think you're reading too much into a Netcraft report here. Outside of the fact that FreeBSD and Linux seem to be about equally present here, the platform on which the projects's *website* is hosted doesn't say anything about the platform the project itself is developed on.
Case in point: openbsd.org is hosted on Solaris. Does that mean that OpenBSD is primarily developed on Solaris? Of course not. And the same thing goes for Apache, too. It's still possible that Apache is primarily developed on FreeBSD, of course, but a Netcraft report doesn't say anything about whether it is.
It does make sense to use it for testing purposes, though. Just think about it: if they had used Star Wars or something, then it would've been a matter of hours until a copy had popped up on ThePirateBay or so. With a movie like this, they're probably pretty safe from copyright infringement - I doubt anyone who has access to it now would *want* to copy it. Heck, they probably have to pay people a bonus just so that they'll watch it when testing the players.
Actually, after RTFA, I think that the reason he was not allowed to leave the room right away was not that he had wrapped his RFID badge in foil, but rather that he had (jokingly) talked about killing another participant.
Of course, everyone with common sense would've realised it was just a joke, but security people tend to take these things seriously.
This was posted by CowboyNeal, though, while the last article was posted by Zonk. Surely you don't expect the editors to actually read Slashdot instead of mechanically clicking on "Publish"?
Because that would essentially be the same thing as preinstalling it. A novice user who doesn't realise that there are alternative media players or who is too lazy to look for them and install them will just click "OK" when presented with a dialog along the lines of "In order to watch this video, you need to install Windows Media Player(tm). Would you like to automatically install it?", so the problem would still be the same in that case.
Contrary to what one might think, after all, this ruling is not *directly* about end-users - it's about giving competitors a fair chance, first and foremost (which will then indirectly lead to a better end-user experience as well). As long as Windows Media Player can be installed in some "priviledged" way (that is, as long as it's not just "download this package from microsoft.com and install it manually, like you would with any other media player"), the problem will subsist.
The dimension of a subspace is the minimum number of vectors that span said subspace, yes (at least, that's one definition of several equivalent ones), but you have to show that that minimum is actually well-defined - for example, there is no a priori reason why I couldn't find one set of four linearly independent vectors that span said subspace and another set of five, where neither set spans the entire subspace anymore if I remove one of the vectors. In this example, it would not be clear whether the dimension of the subspace should be four or five.
:)
This really cannot happen, but it's important to realise that you need to prove this, as it doesn't immediately follow from the definition - you need Steinitz for this (or you could use the more general ultrafilter lemma, too).
Bitrate, OK... frequency, OK... but codec? They're *MP3s*, for goodness' sake. MP3 is not a container format like Ogg, it *is* the codec. I'm sorry, but I'll have to confiscate your geek license now. :)
What is the regular definition of "dimension", though? The dimension of a vector space at least is not the most basic concept you'll come across in that field - it's not immediately clear why you couldn't have two bases with different cardinality, for example. Or, for that matter, it's not immediately clear why there has to be a basis at all (and in fact, you have to use the axiom of choice to prove that this is always the case; if you don't accept it, there are vector spaces without a basis and thus without a defined number of dimensions, strange as that may sound).
And the Hausdorff dimension isn't really better, either.
Of course, all these things are basic (or at least easily grokkable) for a mathematician, but for laypeople, they may not really mean anything. I remember giving a talk about fractals and the fractal dimension in my math class at school once, in the last year, but most people couldn't even accept the fact that a dimension might not be an integer. For them, a dimension was not something you could define, but rather something that existed, in the sense that we have three (or four, if you count time) dimensions we live in, and nothing else. I doubt they would've been comfortable with hearing about things like infinite-dimensional vectorspaces, either. And that *was* in a math class.
I've experienced it a few times, myself - when someone tells me something about a field where I have no experience or prior knowledge whatsoever and that I'm completely unfamiliar with, something that actually does require a bit of thought to understand, then I usually am able to follow them when it's explained, but I can't reproduce it afterwards - it's just too much information at once, and I'm not able to store away all the information when I have to focus on understanding how it all fits together, it seems.
It's something that goes away when I learn some of the basic concepts in a certain field, though.
Oh, that certainly - I was more talking about people like my parents. I've often tried to explain fascinating (to me) mathematical concepts to them in my university days, and they always were interested, too; I think they even managed to understand *why* these things were fascinating when I talked about them, but afterwards, they wouldn't have been able to explain things, not even without caring about the details.
*nods* Well, mathematics has its share of nutcases, too. :) Biology has creationists; physics has Gene Ray (of time cube fame - or should I say notoriety?), and mathematics has intuitionists (which, one might add, is just as stupid a moniker as "intelligent design" - I don't see anything intuitive about their approach). :)
But then, of course, this is an area where mathematics and philosophy mix, and unfortunately, the less rigorous approach of philosophy where new theories aren't based on solid proof but rather on personal reputation is influencing that area.
But luckily, it's pretty much limited to that; most mathematicians getting actual work done [1] seem to follow Dirac for the most part - "shut up and calculate".
1. On a side note, I'm not trying to rag on those working on the foundations of mathematics. Quite the opposite; I really think this is one of the most fascinating areas of mathematics, but I also think that those that endlessly debate whether "tertium non datur" should be accepted or not and similar things are just indulging in a pseudo-intellectual wankfest, not contributing anything useful.
My point was that you don't have to explain all the details in physics to give a meaningful and useful approximation of what things are like. You might not be able to explain all the details, but it often will be enough - if you are just interested in learning what water molecules look like (for example) and why they can form like this, you don't have to know about dual wave/particle nature of elementary particles. Sure, it'll become important at some later point - you can't really understand aromatic structures in chemistry without this, for example -, but for a layperson, it's good enough.
The same thing is not true in mathematics: no matter how simple a problem looks (that is, no matter how easy it is to formulate), the solution can be arbitrarily complex. Why can there be no natural numbers a, b, c (greater than 0) such that a^3 + b^3 = c^3? It's a question that everyone can understand, yet the solution is too complex even for most mathematicians to understand (I have a background in mathematics, and I tried to read it once; I had to stop after less than two pages or so).
Another problem with mathematics is that most people don't know the basic building blocks of mathematics. I think most reasonably intelligent people have a general idea of what molecules are, for example, but if you start talking about functions, or spaces, or groups, you'll immediately lose most people.
Hilbert spaces don't have to be infinite-dimensional.
Outside of that... yes, that is a pretty good description of Hilbert spaces, but you'd probably lose most non-mathematicians I know by the time you said that there could be more than three dimensions.
"kept well-hidden"? Sorry, but that at least is utter rubish. No part of mathematics is kept well-hidden by anyone really; it's just that
1. the general public isn't really interested in mathematics (unlike physics, for example; most non-mathematicians I've met seem to have an instinctive averse reaction when you even say "mathematics")
2. mathematics, in general, cannot be dumbed down simplified for laypeople the same way that other natural sciences can. Someone can have a general idea of what a black hole is even when they don't understand the physical theories behind it, but how do you explain to a layperson what a Hilbert space is?
Coupled together, these things mean that the general public isn't really aware of what mathematicians even study or why it's important to them, but it's not the fault of mathematics (or mathematicians).
That's silly - the same thing could be said about email. I don't know about you, but I'm currently getting around 800 spam messages a day - and while most of it is caught by the filter, that's still an awful lot. Viri and invitations to "unspeakable" sexual acts (exactly what is "unspeakable", anyway? I know a lot of people who'd consider anything except missionary-style after-marriage with-the-intent-to-procreate sex to be "unspeakable", and some who'd view even *that* as unspeakable - a necessary evil) are certainly common, as are offers for cheap medication, body part enlargement and cheap M$ software, phishing, and all the other crap that gets spammed.
Would any ISP use this as an excuse to turn off email for all customers? Of course not; the thought alone is ridiculous, and I think that shows that they're just looking for a convenient scapegoat. I'm not sure what the real reason could be, but it's probably money, in one way or another - turning off news servers means less bandwidth consumption, less hardware needed at the ISP, less administration overhead (i.e., less administrators), and so on.
Given that, and also given that most people don't use seem to Usenet anymore (at least not in the traditional form, especially since web-based services like Google Groups became available), I can understand their decision to stop offering Usenet, but I wish they'd at least be honest about why they're doing so.
That's pretty much LEGO's own fault, though. I used to have tons of LEGOs as a kid, and still have some today, too (not to mention that those I had when I was younger are still stowed away in my parents' attic - I should bug them about digging them out for me again), but I almost never buy new LEGO sets.
Why? A couple of reasons, really:
1. They're unoriginal. I don't really care about Harry Potter or Star Wars sets in the slightest; I don't care about Bionicle or whatever they named that crap, either. And I don't want sets where pretty much every piece was specially designed for just that set, severely reducing its usefulness for my own creations. What I do want is original stuff where I don't feel I'm paying extra for buying a merchandising product. Which brings me to...
2. They're expensive. Really, the pricetags on LEGO sets these days are ridiculous when you consider that they're just a collection of small pieces of plastic that are manufactured with pretty much no human intervention at all (I saw a documentary on their brick factory in Denmark once; very impressive). I'm not sure LEGO was cheaper really when I was a kid (but I didn't pay for it myself back then, of course, so I wouldn't know), but it definitely is too expensive right now. Sometimes, when I see a new set that actually catches my interest, I look at the price tag and say "no, I'm definitely not paying that much".
3. They discontinued the space sets. OK, they have Star Wars now, but that's boring and unoriginal (see above); most of the original space sets (classic, Blacktron, Space Police and all that) just had that certain "special something" that's missing from LEGO sets these days.
4. LEGO does not seem to emphasise building your own stuff as much anymore as they did. I had a few LEGO books in my younger days that had wonderful ideas for what to build; these days, it seems that the company is mostly interested in churning out new sets every year, expecting everyone to buy them before they go out of production again, and never use them to build anything except for the licensed Star Wars or Harry Potter (or whatever) models. There simply doesn't seem to be any room for real imagination anymore.
That being said, I still do buy LEGO occasionally, but given the prices and the general lack of interesting models these days, it's only on eBay. So if someone from LEGO is reading this... you've lost a good customer in me, and I think that's highly unfortunate. I *like* LEGO, and I would love to buy more, but you just don't produce anything that interests me really, and you charge prices that I'm not willing to pay.