You want proof? I'll give you solid, undeniable proof. Pidgey is a Pokemon. In February 2007, Pidgey had his own page at Wikipedia. You could go there and see a small template(since deleted) explaining to you what Pidgey is and various other pieces of information about him. It was objectively a useful resource.
Pidgey no longer has a page. Pidgey has a paragraph. A rather short and dry affair devoid of even the most basic image. One can learn very little about Pidgey from reading it. Objectively, when it comes to Pidgey, the quality of information on Wikipedia has nosedived spectacularly in two years.
"A page for every Pokemon" was once used as a derogatory remark about Wikipedia. Ironically in fact, as it represented a hug strength of the new encyclopedia. But evidently, some faceless Wikipedia bureaucrats took exception to the remark and to the Pidgey page, and decided to all but expunge Pidgey from Wikipedia. There are probably no longer any images of Pidgey on the entire site. He has been subjected to the digital equivalent of a book burning.
And for what? Being a Pokemon? Does being a cartoon character or a children's toy or anything else automatically make something unworthy of a few kilobytes of page space on the the supposed repository of all the world's knowledge. The sad fact is that answer to that question is a resounding YES.
Pokemon was MASSIVE. I saw it consume people. It is still played, almost religiously at cons and the like. It is, more so than the Transformers, the quintessential example of marketing a toy line. If a future researcher wishes to investigate the Pokemon phenomenon, Wikipedia, as a resource, will be less than useless.
Wikipedia page quality, to my mind, peaked in 2006. It has been in slow decline since. An army of bureaucrats and opinionated zealots now hold nigh every page hostage to their whims. When a supposedly factual encyclopedia has the wrong start date for World War 2 for over 5 months, questions must be asked. The answers to those questions are that Wikipedia has, objectively, seen a decline in the quality of its articles, and overall structure, over time.
Re:Chumby homepage stinks, article OK
on
Inside Factory China
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
There has been a shift in corporate thinking over the last 20 years. They have slowly been moving from selling products, to licensing products. Companies worldwide have taken their cue from the software industry.
DRM laden musics. Not for rental DVDs and videos. EULAs on video games. Proprietary printer cartridges. Cars that can only be fixed at licensed dealers. Homeowners associations. The list goes on.
The sad reality is that many companies now think, or behave as if they do think, that once you buy their product they still have control and veto power over how, when, when and who can use it. This has been a huge shift in western industry, thirty years in the making. Its genesis can essentially be traced back to this letter. Once the idea of selling numbers to people, and retaining indefinite control over their use of that number, became firmly entrenched in the law, culture and mindset of our industry, it was much smaller step to apply that same principle to books, cars, nintendos and houses.
I'm not sure where this will end, but I can guarantee you one thing. The myriad of artificial restrictions being placed on property in the western world are most certainly not being applied or enforced in developing countries.
Re:China's economy is going to retool itself..
on
Inside Factory China
·
· Score: 1
you forgot that Japan also is famous for exporting smut videos of hot girls eating bugs and other disgusting things.
Companies are storing more, and more, and more, and more, and more information. About their customers, about their suppliers, about themselves, about employees, about employees friends, about customers friends, about customers employees, etc , etc, etc. It's like a Panopticon Party, and everyone with a datacentre is invited. With hard disc space costs plummeting, processor power rising, and networked recorders becoming ubiquitous, companies and managers everywhere have succumbed to the data deluge, and have meticulously stored and categorized every last bit they can lay their hands on. (For what purpose is a question for another day).
The result. Exabytes of data sitting idle on servers, unencrypted, waiting to to stolen. Predictably it is, usually with nothing more than a USB key, or USB hard disc. The people who pay for such illicit data presumably want it all for something. If the data was even encrypted in the most basic fashion, most of the constant data breaches we here about would never have occurred.
Companies have two options. First, stop gathering and storing this data. That will never happen. Most compaines are data junkies by this point. Secondly; Encrypt, Everything. Everything. Any unencrypted portion of your network is a data breach waiting to happen. Even the slightest crack is a PR disaster waiting to happen. I don't care if its a telnet client on a headless offline BSD system, sitting in a securely locked room in the basement. Someone WILL find a way to lose data using it.
I applaud the submitters goal. It is a worthy one, and is likely the only real thing standing between your credit card number and a fraudsters ebay login page. More power to them.
A university is supposed to educate a child as to....
Universities are there to educate adults. Perhaps you regard 18-22 years olds as "children", but most university departments certainly do not. Those that do tend to have a very poor attitude towards education and the student body in general.
When someone is tailgating you in heavy traffic, you have few options to stopping that behavior quickly
Just slow down. To a crawl if you have to. They will eventually overtake, or you will stop completely. Before it comes to either however, you are now protected from a nasty rear end collision.
I don't get tailgaters. Apparently, they're doing it to make you go faster, but my first instinct when I see a car looming in my rear view mirror is to slow down.
Grammar nazis asside, this is not real serious benchmarking. It doesn't even take into account WHAT Windows 7 installs and WHAT Ubuntu installs.
Worse, it does not take into account what is RUNNING. Windows 7 presumably has a lot of eye candy running by default for example. I'd like to see the Ubuntu results with the compiz cube running in the background.
The best players become nearly unkillable with all the bonuses, special weapons, insane classes, and such they get for being the best players, and the new players become nearly impossible to level, because they're competing against the aforementioned best players.
Enter handicaps. 20v30 man matches. Speed/damage/health bonuses for outmatched noobs. Etc, etc. Not that I think that Killzone or indeed any FPS game will EVER implement such a system.
FPS games tend to degenerate into being _all_ about the frags. Frags are everything and any other aspect of the game comes second place to running up behind someone and killing them as quickly as possible. It's a system that locks many people out even without bonuses. To be fair, the bonuses/XP systems seen nowadays encourage players to keep playing. At least you have a measure of progress.
TF2 and Warhawk show the way. There needs to be more to online competitive multiplayer than simply frags. Players need to be able to bring something to the table other than sniping and run and gunning. There needs to be a variety of tactics and abilities to keep gameplay fresh and to prevent overpowering specialization.
Why are there no games on the PS3 that have an offline split-screen option
Simply put, free online Play.
Notwithstanding party games, most multiplayer titles are more suited to net play than local co-op. FPS games and indeed most other 3D games suffer from the unenviable problem of split screen, which is a serious technical and ergonomic problem. It is much easier for a developer to forgo local split screen in favor of online play nowadays. So they will offer the online mode in preference.
Except.... you have to pay $50 a year for a "Gold" account to play Xbox games online.
Microsoft claims 17 million Xbox live users, but they have so far refused to say how many of those have a "Gold" account. It would be interesting to find out. I know a few people who will not pay to play online purely as a matter of principle. I know more who simply cannot, or are unwilling, to afford the additional cost. I think it's safe to say in any event that there are a LOT of Xbox owners that are not playing on the Live servers, and we haven't even considered people who have purchased Xboxes but are not online at all.
So, if you are a developer for an Xbox title, forgoing split screen in favour of net play is not a realistic option. Halo succeeded, in spite of a lack of net play; Indeed some say because of it. If you are making an Xbox shooter, you have to take into account that people are not necessarily going to be playing online and that there is every possibility they will be playing with friends in the same room.
On PS3 however, PSN is free to play online. I don't think there is a single game that charges players an additional fee. In addition, the PS3 has built in wireless, which reduces the inconvenience of of wiring up the console for net play, and makes it that more likely to be found upstairs in a bedroom than downstairs by a sofa. The net result is, the majority of people with a PS3, will probably end up using the online multiplayer. In addition, the PS3 firmware does not even support multiple users logging in at one time(Though LittleBigPLanet seems to have gotten around this somehow).
Faced with all this, I think many PS3 developers have, tragically, forgone offline split-screen. The only split screen capable titles I can think of, only offer the option online. Offline co-op games, like LittleBigPLanet, do exist, but do not support in game trophies for the second player, reducing the rewards of the experience.
Having said that, Co-op play is moving online more and more. The latest Resident Evil 5 and Mercenaries 2 have shown that developers favour online campaign co-op to split screen. While this is a nice feature, so was offline Co-op back in the day. It's a shame to see it being left by the wayside, especially since the both the quality of internet connections, as well as the people on the other end, is not a guaranteed factor.
I can attest personally to the power and convenience of Flashblock. It's simply a great system.
Upon installation (and a restart), Flashblock will replace all, ALL, flash components on every page with an empty, but clearly outlined box where the flash applet would have been. In this way, over all page layout is unaffected during the block.
At the center of this empty block, Flashblock puts a recognizable stylized "F" icon, which when hovered over, turns into a standard "Play" symbol. Personally, I think it should always be a play symbol, but that's just nit picking. After this icon is clicked, the flash applet, and only THAT applet, loads and begins just as it would have insisted on doing when, or even before the page was finished loading.
No more crazy ads. No more loud and obnoxious audio content. No more flash-bomb pages, slowing the system to a crawl, and/or crashing firefox. Admittedly, the crash problem still exists, but now you risk it only at your own behest. Normal use of flash, e.g. Youtube, is almost completely unaffected, and IMHO even improved by flashblock. The web page is cleanly and gracefully separated from the flash content, as it always should have been.
Flashblock is the first extension I download on any new firefox install. I highly recommend it.
'If you believed that your patent had been infringed, wouldn't you be tempted to do the same thing?'
Has the inanity and anti-logic of the patent system finally become so bad that peoples' basic judgement is now impaired. Has the concept of "Intellectual Property" so twisted the fragile mind of the commentators, and public at large, that we now must see it not only as a fundamental right, but as (Paraphrasing DeValera) an institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law and morality.
Personally, no, I don't see that a patent is so important that I should break not only the law, but also the trust and confidence other people have in me, simply to defend my rights to some obvious "invention". I may be a little behind the times here, but I can't say I would be overly tempted, no.
r=2Gm/c^2. If you cram an amount of mass m into a radius r, you have a black hole.
You assume the validity of that formula as r -> 0 adn as m -> 0 in the case of the LHC. Such an assumption is justified by no theory or experiment in modern physics.
What if a Supernova was created at the LHC? What if it exploded and destroyed all the planets in our solar system out as far as Saturn, as well as the Sun?
Can someone explain to me why this scenario is impossible, or at least, why it is less credible to the general public than Earth swallowing black holes?
But don't expect the average man on the street to ever accept the risk of death to themselves and families for your particular cause.
The average man risks the death of himself and his entire family on average once per day, each morning when they all get into their motor vehicle to be driven to work and school. No other daily activity in the history of man has ever carried so much risk, to so many, with so little thought given to it.
The LHC simulates high energy collisions that occur every day in the upper atmosphere. It's never going to do anything that has not occurred, day after day, and night after night, whilst people lay sleeping safely in their beds, or lay dying painfully after a traffic accident.
Admittedly, traffic accidents, no matter how tragic, will not sell as many media rags and advertisements as stories about giant black holes swallowing the earth (complete with artists conceptions and mass screams of terror), but the fact is, traffic accidents remain a real and probable danger to everyone. Black holes swallowing the earth however, remain in science fiction, along with time machines and Mr. Spock.
Let's be honest here. LHC scaremongering has once, solitary reason for its existence. An irresponsible media, concerned more with advertising revenue than it is with the public interest. The gullible public is just that. Gullible. If they were told that the LHC was going to explode into a supernova instead of collapse into a black hole, they would have believed it all the same. Reason does not enter into the equation. Only idle minds, craving excitement in boring lives, willing to believe anything just to have something to gossip about.
You can be a member of the gullible public. You can be, as you put it, a "arrogant, juvenile, man-child", uninterested in reason or rationality or the scientific method. Or, you can be a Responsible Mature Adult, and read up about the LHC. Educate yourself. Find out about the science. Discover what the scaremongering is all about, and then realise that it is just that, scaremongering. Just that, and only that.
The LHC will never produce a black hole. No matter how hysterical people get about it.
Forget Freenet. Most Bittorrent clients have a checkbox in the options somewhere that routes traffic through the Tor Network. This measure is going nowhere.
If you find it offensive, then don't read it. I can tell you from experience that their have been far, far more offensive troll posts on Slashdot and that ALL of them have been modded to -1 in seconds. The system works, and I see no reason to change it in order to placate you or anyone else in the offense brigade.
You, and people like you, who think that material you personally object to should be destroyed or removed, are the single biggest problem in the western world today. Here we have a system that appropriately and expediently deals with troll posts, and yet you are still not happy. You want the material "purged". You find issue with its very existence, and moreover, insist that the rest of the world cater to your whims.
Do you know the difference between you and a fundamentalist mullah complaining about "immodest dress" or "images" for or of women? There is none. You're the same person, just with different hang ups. And the rest of us should not have to give up our freedoms to satisfy your scruples.
Soap Operas are among the most damaging and destructive influences in our society today. I have witnessed first hand the pain and suffering they can wreak upon the people who watch them and those close to them. An unending visual diet of petty pickering, gross injustices, squabbling, two bit storylines and overblown melodrama can wear down the common sense of even the most stoic individual, turning them into a capricious, cantankerous, shrew with violent mood swings who starts flaming arguments at the slightest provocation.
I can say with surety that no child of mine will ever, ever be allowed to watch a soap opera of any kind. I would rather they were smoking crack. At least their are clinics for that.
It's light, portable, needs no batteries and isn't subject to arbitrary restrictions or revocations. No devices or readers are needed. You don't need a "credit rating" to use it. And I can pay for pretty much anything, except those services which require me to spend extra cash on an alternative transaction medium.
Slashdot Mirror
False, false, false. Demonstrably false.
You want proof? I'll give you solid, undeniable proof. Pidgey is a Pokemon. In February 2007, Pidgey had his own page at Wikipedia. You could go there and see a small template(since deleted) explaining to you what Pidgey is and various other pieces of information about him. It was objectively a useful resource.
Pidgey no longer has a page. Pidgey has a paragraph. A rather short and dry affair devoid of even the most basic image. One can learn very little about Pidgey from reading it. Objectively, when it comes to Pidgey, the quality of information on Wikipedia has nosedived spectacularly in two years.
"A page for every Pokemon" was once used as a derogatory remark about Wikipedia. Ironically in fact, as it represented a hug strength of the new encyclopedia. But evidently, some faceless Wikipedia bureaucrats took exception to the remark and to the Pidgey page, and decided to all but expunge Pidgey from Wikipedia. There are probably no longer any images of Pidgey on the entire site. He has been subjected to the digital equivalent of a book burning.
And for what? Being a Pokemon? Does being a cartoon character or a children's toy or anything else automatically make something unworthy of a few kilobytes of page space on the the supposed repository of all the world's knowledge. The sad fact is that answer to that question is a resounding YES.
Pokemon was MASSIVE. I saw it consume people. It is still played, almost religiously at cons and the like. It is, more so than the Transformers, the quintessential example of marketing a toy line. If a future researcher wishes to investigate the Pokemon phenomenon, Wikipedia, as a resource, will be less than useless.
Wikipedia page quality, to my mind, peaked in 2006. It has been in slow decline since. An army of bureaucrats and opinionated zealots now hold nigh every page hostage to their whims. When a supposedly factual encyclopedia has the wrong start date for World War 2 for over 5 months, questions must be asked. The answers to those questions are that Wikipedia has, objectively, seen a decline in the quality of its articles, and overall structure, over time.
There has been a shift in corporate thinking over the last 20 years. They have slowly been moving from selling products, to licensing products. Companies worldwide have taken their cue from the software industry.
DRM laden musics. Not for rental DVDs and videos. EULAs on video games. Proprietary printer cartridges. Cars that can only be fixed at licensed dealers. Homeowners associations. The list goes on.
The sad reality is that many companies now think, or behave as if they do think, that once you buy their product they still have control and veto power over how, when, when and who can use it. This has been a huge shift in western industry, thirty years in the making. Its genesis can essentially be traced back to this letter. Once the idea of selling numbers to people, and retaining indefinite control over their use of that number, became firmly entrenched in the law, culture and mindset of our industry, it was much smaller step to apply that same principle to books, cars, nintendos and houses.
I'm not sure where this will end, but I can guarantee you one thing. The myriad of artificial restrictions being placed on property in the western world are most certainly not being applied or enforced in developing countries.
It's true!!
No. Let me explain to you how this works, with a story link.
Companies are storing more, and more, and more, and more, and more information. About their customers, about their suppliers, about themselves, about employees, about employees friends, about customers friends, about customers employees, etc , etc, etc. It's like a Panopticon Party, and everyone with a datacentre is invited. With hard disc space costs plummeting, processor power rising, and networked recorders becoming ubiquitous, companies and managers everywhere have succumbed to the data deluge, and have meticulously stored and categorized every last bit they can lay their hands on. (For what purpose is a question for another day).
The result. Exabytes of data sitting idle on servers, unencrypted, waiting to to stolen. Predictably it is, usually with nothing more than a USB key, or USB hard disc. The people who pay for such illicit data presumably want it all for something. If the data was even encrypted in the most basic fashion, most of the constant data breaches we here about would never have occurred.
Companies have two options. First, stop gathering and storing this data. That will never happen. Most compaines are data junkies by this point. Secondly; Encrypt, Everything. Everything. Any unencrypted portion of your network is a data breach waiting to happen. Even the slightest crack is a PR disaster waiting to happen. I don't care if its a telnet client on a headless offline BSD system, sitting in a securely locked room in the basement. Someone WILL find a way to lose data using it.
I applaud the submitters goal. It is a worthy one, and is likely the only real thing standing between your credit card number and a fraudsters ebay login page. More power to them.
Universities are there to educate adults. Perhaps you regard 18-22 years olds as "children", but most university departments certainly do not. Those that do tend to have a very poor attitude towards education and the student body in general.
And this is why you should never accept any job or position that requires you to conform to someone elses morals.
Just slow down. To a crawl if you have to. They will eventually overtake, or you will stop completely. Before it comes to either however, you are now protected from a nasty rear end collision.
I don't get tailgaters. Apparently, they're doing it to make you go faster, but my first instinct when I see a car looming in my rear view mirror is to slow down.
Worse, it does not take into account what is RUNNING. Windows 7 presumably has a lot of eye candy running by default for example. I'd like to see the Ubuntu results with the compiz cube running in the background.
Rejoice!
Enter handicaps. 20v30 man matches. Speed/damage/health bonuses for outmatched noobs. Etc, etc. Not that I think that Killzone or indeed any FPS game will EVER implement such a system.
FPS games tend to degenerate into being _all_ about the frags. Frags are everything and any other aspect of the game comes second place to running up behind someone and killing them as quickly as possible. It's a system that locks many people out even without bonuses. To be fair, the bonuses/XP systems seen nowadays encourage players to keep playing. At least you have a measure of progress.
TF2 and Warhawk show the way. There needs to be more to online competitive multiplayer than simply frags. Players need to be able to bring something to the table other than sniping and run and gunning. There needs to be a variety of tactics and abilities to keep gameplay fresh and to prevent overpowering specialization.
Simply put, free online Play.
Notwithstanding party games, most multiplayer titles are more suited to net play than local co-op. FPS games and indeed most other 3D games suffer from the unenviable problem of split screen, which is a serious technical and ergonomic problem. It is much easier for a developer to forgo local split screen in favor of online play nowadays. So they will offer the online mode in preference.
Except.... you have to pay $50 a year for a "Gold" account to play Xbox games online.
Microsoft claims 17 million Xbox live users, but they have so far refused to say how many of those have a "Gold" account. It would be interesting to find out. I know a few people who will not pay to play online purely as a matter of principle. I know more who simply cannot, or are unwilling, to afford the additional cost. I think it's safe to say in any event that there are a LOT of Xbox owners that are not playing on the Live servers, and we haven't even considered people who have purchased Xboxes but are not online at all.
So, if you are a developer for an Xbox title, forgoing split screen in favour of net play is not a realistic option. Halo succeeded, in spite of a lack of net play; Indeed some say because of it. If you are making an Xbox shooter, you have to take into account that people are not necessarily going to be playing online and that there is every possibility they will be playing with friends in the same room.
On PS3 however, PSN is free to play online. I don't think there is a single game that charges players an additional fee. In addition, the PS3 has built in wireless, which reduces the inconvenience of of wiring up the console for net play, and makes it that more likely to be found upstairs in a bedroom than downstairs by a sofa. The net result is, the majority of people with a PS3, will probably end up using the online multiplayer. In addition, the PS3 firmware does not even support multiple users logging in at one time(Though LittleBigPLanet seems to have gotten around this somehow).
Faced with all this, I think many PS3 developers have, tragically, forgone offline split-screen. The only split screen capable titles I can think of, only offer the option online. Offline co-op games, like LittleBigPLanet, do exist, but do not support in game trophies for the second player, reducing the rewards of the experience.
Having said that, Co-op play is moving online more and more. The latest Resident Evil 5 and Mercenaries 2 have shown that developers favour online campaign co-op to split screen. While this is a nice feature, so was offline Co-op back in the day. It's a shame to see it being left by the wayside, especially since the both the quality of internet connections, as well as the people on the other end, is not a guaranteed factor.
I can attest personally to the power and convenience of Flashblock. It's simply a great system.
Upon installation (and a restart), Flashblock will replace all, ALL, flash components on every page with an empty, but clearly outlined box where the flash applet would have been. In this way, over all page layout is unaffected during the block.
At the center of this empty block, Flashblock puts a recognizable stylized "F" icon, which when hovered over, turns into a standard "Play" symbol. Personally, I think it should always be a play symbol, but that's just nit picking. After this icon is clicked, the flash applet, and only THAT applet, loads and begins just as it would have insisted on doing when, or even before the page was finished loading.
No more crazy ads. No more loud and obnoxious audio content. No more flash-bomb pages, slowing the system to a crawl, and/or crashing firefox. Admittedly, the crash problem still exists, but now you risk it only at your own behest. Normal use of flash, e.g. Youtube, is almost completely unaffected, and IMHO even improved by flashblock. The web page is cleanly and gracefully separated from the flash content, as it always should have been.
Flashblock is the first extension I download on any new firefox install. I highly recommend it.
Has the inanity and anti-logic of the patent system finally become so bad that peoples' basic judgement is now impaired. Has the concept of "Intellectual Property" so twisted the fragile mind of the commentators, and public at large, that we now must see it not only as a fundamental right, but as (Paraphrasing DeValera) an institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law and morality.
Personally, no, I don't see that a patent is so important that I should break not only the law, but also the trust and confidence other people have in me, simply to defend my rights to some obvious "invention". I may be a little behind the times here, but I can't say I would be overly tempted, no.
Fixed.
You assume the validity of that formula as r -> 0 adn as m -> 0 in the case of the LHC. Such an assumption is justified by no theory or experiment in modern physics.
What if a Supernova was created at the LHC? What if it exploded and destroyed all the planets in our solar system out as far as Saturn, as well as the Sun?
Can someone explain to me why this scenario is impossible, or at least, why it is less credible to the general public than Earth swallowing black holes?
The average man risks the death of himself and his entire family on average once per day, each morning when they all get into their motor vehicle to be driven to work and school. No other daily activity in the history of man has ever carried so much risk, to so many, with so little thought given to it.
The LHC simulates high energy collisions that occur every day in the upper atmosphere. It's never going to do anything that has not occurred, day after day, and night after night, whilst people lay sleeping safely in their beds, or lay dying painfully after a traffic accident.
Admittedly, traffic accidents, no matter how tragic, will not sell as many media rags and advertisements as stories about giant black holes swallowing the earth (complete with artists conceptions and mass screams of terror), but the fact is, traffic accidents remain a real and probable danger to everyone. Black holes swallowing the earth however, remain in science fiction, along with time machines and Mr. Spock.
Let's be honest here. LHC scaremongering has once, solitary reason for its existence. An irresponsible media, concerned more with advertising revenue than it is with the public interest. The gullible public is just that. Gullible. If they were told that the LHC was going to explode into a supernova instead of collapse into a black hole, they would have believed it all the same. Reason does not enter into the equation. Only idle minds, craving excitement in boring lives, willing to believe anything just to have something to gossip about.
You can be a member of the gullible public. You can be, as you put it, a "arrogant, juvenile, man-child", uninterested in reason or rationality or the scientific method. Or, you can be a Responsible Mature Adult, and read up about the LHC. Educate yourself. Find out about the science. Discover what the scaremongering is all about, and then realise that it is just that, scaremongering. Just that, and only that.
The LHC will never produce a black hole. No matter how hysterical people get about it.
Now, please explain to me where I can buy the Alundra soundtrack? Because not every piece of music people want is available for sale at any price.
That's never going to happen now.
Forget Freenet. Most Bittorrent clients have a checkbox in the options somewhere that routes traffic through the Tor Network. This measure is going nowhere.
No! It will be the start of The Révolution!
If you find it offensive, then don't read it. I can tell you from experience that their have been far, far more offensive troll posts on Slashdot and that ALL of them have been modded to -1 in seconds. The system works, and I see no reason to change it in order to placate you or anyone else in the offense brigade.
You, and people like you, who think that material you personally object to should be destroyed or removed, are the single biggest problem in the western world today. Here we have a system that appropriately and expediently deals with troll posts, and yet you are still not happy. You want the material "purged". You find issue with its very existence, and moreover, insist that the rest of the world cater to your whims.
Do you know the difference between you and a fundamentalist mullah complaining about "immodest dress" or "images" for or of women? There is none. You're the same person, just with different hang ups. And the rest of us should not have to give up our freedoms to satisfy your scruples.
Soap Operas are among the most damaging and destructive influences in our society today. I have witnessed first hand the pain and suffering they can wreak upon the people who watch them and those close to them. An unending visual diet of petty pickering, gross injustices, squabbling, two bit storylines and overblown melodrama can wear down the common sense of even the most stoic individual, turning them into a capricious, cantankerous, shrew with violent mood swings who starts flaming arguments at the slightest provocation.
I can say with surety that no child of mine will ever, ever be allowed to watch a soap opera of any kind. I would rather they were smoking crack. At least their are clinics for that.
I've used cold hard cash, and that's neatest.
It's light, portable, needs no batteries and isn't subject to arbitrary restrictions or revocations. No devices or readers are needed. You don't need a "credit rating" to use it. And I can pay for pretty much anything, except those services which require me to spend extra cash on an alternative transaction medium.
Cash. Is. King.
Yes we CAN! It has always existed by the divine grace of The Lord Jesus Christ!!