But I bet the game didn't even bother changing the default passwords on the real world signs. Clearly this was all the games fault ;P

While all you said of AT&T is very true, in this particular case the biggest extent of their evilness was selling off the "AT&T Wireless" brand name to a non-AT&T company, thus creating this confusion.

Remember Cingular Wireless? That is the company that wanted to confuse by changing names, and we now call AT&T Wireless.
It's mostly even the same management to this day.

Cingular was/is pretty evil too in fact. The only reason their evil is on such a lower level is the huge head start AT&T had by existing for so damn long.

That is still a much better definition than yours appears to be!

16 years is at least a number and a unit of time. Your argument that "Closed source bugs are found in never years" is the definition of "quickly" most everyone would call strange.

So basically you are arguing that illegal requests should be honored, or Google is simply being evil, correct?

Just because most (if not all) EU countries have laws as you stated, I still see no relevance to them why Google should remove all Apple Inc search results because Microsoft requested it (and the reverse), nor do I see any relevance to those laws regarding Google removing search results about me when some random smuck requested it and that info has nothing to do with mr random smuck.

Do you really think removing such results is a good idea?
No?
Then perhaps laying off the "Google is teh Evilz" mantra until they have a few minutes to sort out the valid requests from the invalid and outright illegal ones.

I'd choose Google fiber with Google monitoring my usage in an open way that I actually somewhat trust, over time warner or comcast both of which monitor my usage in the exact same way but lie about it constantly while charging me more for less service in return.

It's not even what I would call a choice, it's a no brainer.

Err, that was supposed to be just "video games" not "video game streams" there.

The streaming aspect is just a subset of the whole video game industry. There is still plenty of pie for that to be a nice slice of, but it's far from the top taken alone.

(Thanks slashdot for not letting me post a correction for for-ever after the original post! Will beta at least accept more than one hit per hour?)

I can't answer for anyone else why exactly video game streams are currently the top grossing form of entertainment in the US *period* - but the fact is they are.

Grand theft auto 5 alone pulled in more money this year than any given form of entertainment. That includes movies, TV, books, you name it.

The various styles of game recordings (walk throughs, lets plays, streams, etc) taken as a whole compete quite well against other established forms of entertainment as well.

Asking if people are so depressed they resort to (games|tv|movies|books|education|workaholics|.*) seems a stupid question, and one you already know the answer to since you do the exact same thing yourself when bored. Why are YOU so depressed with life you do the things you do in your down time?

I see no problem with gaming taking off like it is, and it is far from wasted in "the real world."
Gaming is currently only one or two notches below porn at pushing the edge of technology right now, and with the current state of tech research I can honestly say it is welcome.

You may have better luck asking the baby with a large cork.

That or perhaps replacing the exploding popcorn in the microwave with the soon-to-be exploding baby.
Just don't confuse which was which when you sit down for the movie!

I myself just recently discovered the existence of non-invasive probing (a feature included in a microwave just purchased by a friend last month), and while very impressed with the concept, was less so with the outcome.

I'm not sure if there are different non-invasive methods on the market, but this particular model somehow ended up using the water vapor released during microwaving to obtain its feedback.
In cases where it couldn't read anything (seemingly for foods that don't release much vapor) it wouldn't kick in, but when it did the foods still seemed to be more crisped on the outside while colder on the inside.

Certainly an improvement over cheap-o walmart microwaves on sale these days, but I guess I'm spoiled.

My microwave is a hand-me-down from my parents, who purchased it within the first year I was born.
It is a 35 year old GE brand, sporting a VFD, a "new solid state!" tag line on the front panel, and inside is a 1/4th inch headphone jack for use with a metal probe.
I've only ever used the probe once for cooking a turkey, more as an experiment as I usually use the oven for that and prefer including stuffing - but was amazed how even from outside-in the meat ended up cooked.

I assumed such research already took place long ago in-so-far as wired probes were concerned, but your comment makes me wonder if a newer model microwave still using a wired probe would have substantial improvements...
I realize the reliability will be next to crap, but such is most all products sold these days sadly :/

I'm not exactly "seriously shopping" for a new microwave, but the realist in me knows my current one likely won't last as long as I do (I hope anyway!), and as friends replace their current units so frequently I'm often reminded I'll eventually have to deal with and be in that situation myself too.

Usually that refers to the carriers fixed hotspots around town that one can pay by the hour or whatnot for access. If you have a cell package with them, use of the hotspots does not cost extra nor on a timer.

Personally I don't spend much time in McDonalds and the like, let alone spending time there on the Internet, but for people who are this feature is aimed at them.

Of course any access point that is open or you have access to is always available.

Don't blame me for firefox spell check. But to answer your question, no I am very bad at spelling, which is why I only questioned that "fix" for a few seconds instead of not at all as would be usual.

Why would you suspect I am not familiar with what it entails however? Was that the multiple times I described it in detail that threw you off? Or was it your inability to look past a couple letters being swapped around that clearly had no effect on your understanding of my point?

Since you seem OK making such assumptions, I'll take the safe route and answer my own question with a likely incorrect but still comical answer.

SHH!!! I dont know about you, but I personally am really looking forward to the $50000/month checks these businesses are arguing they must pay me and every other land owner for the right to run their cables and such through our yards!

At this point I don't care which side the companies want to argue for - I just plan to hold them to it across the board.

They can either give us net neutrality regulations and keep imminent domain regulations as well, or alternately, they can say none of that regulation should exist, because net neutrality will harm their bottom line and they want to cut us all checks for the privileged of actually having this cable network they want say-so over.

So even if we lose the net neutraliy battle, at the rates I plan to charge them for a cable troff I can safely say we will still have won the regulation war (and I'll never have to work another day again!)

Perhaps the biggest advantage in favor of that option is by following both lines of logic to their ultimate conclusions. Both will end up fucking up most of the remaining first world features this country still has left, and fuck it pretty equally bad.
If the ISPs insist on destroying world altering infrastructure that has been built over the past 200 years no matter which path they go down, we can at least shore up our retirement funds at their expense!

I say it's a win-win for us, and the ISPs argued yesterday this would be a win-win for them too (before they thought things through, which while unlikely, still technically may happen)

OK, I'm willing to grant that the public mostly doesn't understand, let alone care about, net neutrality.
I'll also go along and grant that companies such as ISPs don't see regulation as good, and that is a point against net neutrality in their case.

So lets follow such a setup to end game. Lets revoke imminent domain regulations as well!
This should be pretty easy comparatively.

a) I can't see many, if any, individuals seeing this move as a bad thing in any way. Especially so once explained that imminent domain is the only thing keeping comcast and time warner telecom from paying you a monthly rental fee for running their wires on/under your land.
Being able to charge each utility $10000 /month is a hell of a lot of missed income for us!

b) The ISPs are already starting off with a negative score in attempting to argue for keeping imminent domain regulation, after all the quotes and talking points they have put out stating how awful and destructive such regulation will be to them.
I personally wouldn't want to see them go out of business, so we should get rid of the regulations and have each and every land owner charging them extra rent in order to not have them go under.

(No I don't understand how spending more than $0 saves them money - but I don't care either, it was their claim, and not my place to explain how their finances work. Otherwise we might have to grant that the ISPs are lying about their finances)

Wow, I think I just felt two brain vessels pop from the sheer concentration of stupidity and lies.

So you can get your so claimed non-existent caching servers right here
https://www.netflix.com/openco...

You could also get free peering agreements with netflix, with more info at that same URL.
If offering free peering is being assholes about things however, I'd hate to see the cruel names you throw out at netflix when your own ISP tells you to go fuck yourself with your netflix peer...

If your ISP can't afford the internet bandwidth for one copy of a stream, in order to send that cached copy to each and every one of their customers an infinite amount of times... Well hopefully you can see why the ISP would get the blame here.

Also you really should do something about the guys in your home holding a gun to your head and forcing you to demand netflix send data to you. Would you like us to contact the police for you?

Sadly a surprisingly large number of core routers out there won't even propagate a /24, despite being the official minimum. A lot still dropped /22's and smaller, some even dropping /20's.
I can understand end point routers doing this, as Cisco RAM isn't exactly cheap and in the end that normally would only actually effect the users at that one end point. But I was surprised how many were actually backbone routers! (I'm looking at you cogent)

Back in 1996 or so the ISP I worked for had to get a /20 just to avoid all that crap, which arguably was more than overkill (we did dialup, webhosting, and "low speed" colo aka T1 speeds)

Ironically, a couple years after that ISP went out of business, ARIN still didn't revoke the IP block or ASN despite being a year behind on payment.
The contacts were still in my name (apparently being the last sysadmin to bother updating them) so after checking with the founder I ended up making the payments and keeping the IP block myself for another few years.

I relinquished the /20 back to ARIN in 2007 mainly due to the shortages, and they reallocated it to another company not 3 months later (their standard at the time was to not reallocate for at least one full year)

There are still days when I wonder if I should have kept it... But at least I can say I did my part as a good netizen.