I'm sure advertising firms will pretend that they paid for that bandwidth and they can do anything they want with it. That you get to use the internet at all is entirely by the blessing of advertisers.

The idea that the Internet couldn't support itself with ads is a big lie. Would the Internet change if we all blocked ads, yes. Would the Internet go away, no. It was here, shuffling packets for scientists and engineers long before Google and Yahoo showed up. Can useful services be sustained free of charge without ads? Wikipedia is the biggest example of that, but there are other examples.

I'm of the third position, that we could have fixed this 50 years ago. But now it's too late and we're all screwed. Time to stock up on supplied for the apocalypse and ride this thing out.

My favorite BBS closed when the SysOp hired hitmen (undercover cops) to kill a rival SysOp that started dating his ex-gf. After he got out of prison he started his BBS back up as a primarily pornographic place. Originally it was a multiline BBS with chat and internet gateways, so a big loss in my opinion.

I wish I could remember enough to Google the story. It was in West Michigan and the rival went by the CountZero. This was the 1990s, so not a lot of the local news articles are online.

LORD didn't work with them initially. And we mostly use HS/Link which could only transfer files. By the time SMODEM came around, I have already taken down the most of the doors for lack of interest.

Sound the alarms! Pop artists of one particular style are no longer being appreciated as much as they were 3 years ago. Will they now have to suffer in obscurity? change the style of art they practice? oh woe is me?

True story, one of the local SysOps has a large group of users visit his house in a threatening manner over his online behavior. He ended up shutting down his rather popular BBS over the incidents.

But back to the original point, I hated LORD so I didn't run it, despite people requesting me to put it back up. It was very popular, but primarily my BBS was there to shuffle files from one calling zone to another. (we had local toll zones back then)

I hated LORD, it would tie up my 1 line BBS with useless people playing games when they should be uploading stuff and maintaining their ratio.
I had a few other BBS doors that tended to tie up the line less, but man was LORD popular back in the day.

It's my dystopian fantasy, I get to make the rules.

That would violate company policy. That's what's hard about it.

Way to close on a discussion. bravo!

Is E afflicted with condition #8839669 or #8836996 ?

Oh well, the treatment for #8836996 is covered by Eirs medical plan, let's try that one first. Only alternative is to reevaluate patient #113-4551-92130, but that could take months and condition #8839669 is known to be fatal.

I forget, so please refresh my memory, are liberals for government control of the banks or are they for bank control of the government?

(I'm pretty sure I'm against either)

Maybe it's my American bias, but it's not possible for a bank to steal from the government. Because governments are property of the bank.

The problem here is the other banks were not able to transfer the entire country's GDP to their individual executives.

the PocketCHIP has a screen and keyboard.

You could probably go for a few days if you were careful about sleep states and the display and used a big battery. If you chose to run on alkaline batteries instead of rechargeable you can go longer (realize that AA is about 2000mAh, while a LiPO of a similar volume is rarely more than 500mAh). eInk display instead of backlit LCD/TFT is going to make it into a pretty effective Calculator platform, but that's a fairly involved DIY project because the PocketCHIP is not eInk.

ps - the above is a wild guess, but I was one of the original Kindle developers.