What the article is referring to as "autoplay" is actually preloading. The video is not playing on its own, it's just being cached in case you want to click on it. This could certainly be a problem for people on limited data plans. It is not nearly the same kind of awfulness as genuine autoplay, where the video starts up without asking permission.

You're doing it wrong.

See, this is the kind of problem that makes it difficult for tech support to help you.

>how about the U.K. where miserly pols are closing libraries even though the Guardian says "a third of UK children do not own a single book and three-quarters claim never to read outside school"?

So, the argument here is that at least 75% of the children never use libraries, so libraries should be kept open? Interesting but, I'm afraid you've lost me there.

I don't really see reading books on a phone. The text is too small. On a tablet, sure, that works, and I've been very happy to dump all my shelves and shelves of books for a simple single slab of electronics.

Do I have to be the one to note that we don't have any intelligent machines? None of them have any more of a mind than a toaster. I don't think there's an AI out there that can even approximate the intelligence of a cockroach.

This is just random nerd click-bait although, at least it's nominally "news for nerds" for a change.

It's the same thing that's taken down games like World of Warcraft. They kept making it easier and easier, hoping to gain more players. After a while, the game is just too simple and repetitive to interest anyone. The whole thing just collapses.

Yeah, WoW is technically still around, but the players have been dropping out so badly that they have to consolidate realms now, instead of bringing out new ones. Even so, it's alarmingly vacant.

Slashdot's been running awfully heavy on marketing promotional material, lately, with things that aren't even available yet. This one doesn't even have a price? I thought I checked the "ads disabled" checkbox.

Ah, we've found a new slogan for Slashdot.

This was a study on Italians. It also smells suspiciously like the old "games cause violence", "comics cause moral decay", "music causes moral decay" sorts of studies. Social networks are modern, so they're suspicious, and probably evil, right?

This word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

Always? They might be better now but, I've seen massive amounts of data turned to useless piles of crud by tapes getting tangled in the drive. Given that they were generally used for critical backups and only pulled out of storage when you needed them, that was not a good failure mode. Given how slow they were, your previous backup was somewhat out-of-date, and you'd also be needing to replace the tape drive that had all of your precious data wrapped around inside it.

I don't play WoW any more, World of Warcraft, but when I did, I was fully serious about it. I might spend 18 hours a day at it. I ran guilds myself and was a key member of others. And this apparently surprises people but, some of the core guildmembers were grandmothers. Grandmothers are people you really, really want in a guild. They're giving and forgiving and they can really kick ass. They've got more sense than the rest of your raid team combined and they're totally dedicated. Possibly until their grandchild picks a different server.

Is this supposed to be news?

Anything you have ever put online can reasonably be assumed to be permanent. If you had a blog once and deleted it, years ago, you can often still reactivate it with all of the previous content still totally intact. Aside from the companies themselves keeping all data of any sort forever, odd creatures like the Wayback Machine and RSS feeds eager to slurp down text will preserve your drunken 3am ramblings for posterity. Data space is very cheap, right now, and text in particular barely makes a tiny blip on the map.

I might point out that the power of the vacuum cleaner has no relationship to its noise level. The noise is considered a selling point, a feature, because people have this curious tendency to think, "oh yes, that's causing me permanent ear damage, so it must be doing a good job." People conflate noise with power.

Don't ask about the dust in the corner. I'm protecting my ears. I swear it.

You always see mice shown as gray in cartoons, it's their default state. I've had mice, and they're a deep brown loamy earth color... but my friends still thought they were gray. So, I don't know what that's all about but, there appears to be ranges of color perception that aren't really clocked as "color blindness", which may not be an entirely useful phrase for something that isn't exactly binary. Now, if you specify that you're "red-green colorblind" that gives me some practical information. I'd probably still be curious as to what color you thought a mouse was.

Not crimes, civil charges that were entirely disputable. Considering that he was a fairly attractive young gay man, he might also have had significant qualms about the old and generally inaccurate meme of prison rape.