Display:block doesn't actually work. It's a vestige from my first pass (long ago) that I forgot to remove when it proved impotent.

The script just adds an angry red banner at the top of every page served.

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("sugarstring.com") {

body:before {
  content: "Forbidden from covering American spying or net neutrality by Verizon's corporate sponsorship";
  color: #FF0000;
  display: block;
  text-align: center;
  font-size: 3vmax;
  padding-top: 10vh !important;
  padding-bottom: 10vh !important;
}

}

Nope, much of the outrage is coming from the Seattle Times who had their website spoofed.

As the owners of the Seattle Times' tarnished trademark (and depending on the quality of the spoof, quite likely the copyright holders to a significant number of infringements on that front as well to "decorate" the spoofed site), they have more right to outrage here than anyone.

Beyond, of course, the righteous outrage of a population which has granted its government certain limited powers in the interest of maintaining a functional civil society, only to have that government routinely flaunt its willfully overstepping those powers. But then, that whole constitution thing went out of fashion long before we invaded a sovereign Iraq because a group of Saudi nationals blew up one of our buildings.

Please, cite the violated law. Thank you.

Identity theft. "Corporations are people too", remember? Thus spake Mittens, and whether we like it or not, the courts have largely agreed.

Or more practically, try trademark dilution by tarnishment: "Typically, the only relief available for trademark dilution is injunctive relief. However, if the defendant 'willfully' intended to trade on the owner's reputation or to cause dilution of the famous mark, the owner of the mark may also be entitled to other remedies, including the defendant's profits, damages, attorneys' fees, and destruction of the infringing goods."

Wow... I don't personally care for the Walled iGarden, but you don't just get to make up numbers and then damn them for your imagination.

Brown?

Brown???

Sorry, I knew too many Brownies back in my uni days. More likely, they just forgot about "bigger bottom, better borrow" and broke the wave function the old fashioned way. ;)

/ I could also have gone with "paid daddy to break it for them", but took the high ground... this time!

I am willing to bet some joe-blow intern infected the network with someone doing some amazingly easy social engineering to him/her.

Who needs social engineering? Just drop an infected flash drive somewhere near the front door, and sooner or later (usually sooner) someone will pick it up and plug it in.

"Nuh-uh", you say? "They certainly have stupid things like autoruns turned off on the Whitehouse network!"

"Hmm, what do we have on here... Random spreadsheet crap, OSHA regulations Powerpoint crap, launch code crap, more random crap, okay some mostly-geezer music I'll check out later, RNC 2016 strategy crap, even more random crap... Hmm, Fappening.Jennifer.Lawrence.Complete.zip.exe? Oooh, awesome, I never did get that on last leaked pic of her!" *click*

Powerpoint has been a weapon against clear thinking, preparing for a meeting, and keeping people interested in what you're saying for a long time.

No one has ever cared about what the presenter had to say at meetings.

It just took more effort before Powerpoint - Both by the presenter, who had to actually prepare instead of cutting and pasting Wikipedia into a slideshow; and by the audience, who had to actually look at the presenter (thereby risking eye-contact) rather than glazing over while staring blankly at a projector screen.

Really, we should thank Microsoft for Powerpoint. Instead of meetings dragging on and on and on as the presenter rambles and people ask stupid questions in a futile effort to remain awake, now the meeting only lasts as long as the slideshow, no one asks any stupid questions, and everyone can go back to doing actual work that much sooner.

And I care about one more crappy corporate-controlled portal site why? Other than the "will they set up a GeoCities page next"-esque shock-value that any company in 2014 still believes their customers give the least damn about their ISP's home page, of course.

If Verizon doesn't want news about the ways the intelligence community and Verizon conspire to rape us all, hey, their portal. And if I want actual news, hey, not their portal. It all balances out.

Can we get over this, please?

The fact that a supermajority vote can potentially allow Ello to someday run ads still leaves Ello 167% less obnoxious than Facebook.

Seriously, this reminds me of the 2004 election again, where a draft dodger managed to successfully demonize the war record of an actual veteran. WTF, seriously - Does The Zuck write copy for Slashdot now?

Apparently, you meant the work "presumably". ;)

But my point still holds - It doesn't count as cherry picking to quote the actual summary, even if the author wrote what he wrote speculatively.

If I say "in my opinion, dogs are better than cats", and someone points out my hypocrisy for having two cats and zero dogs, I can't then weasel out of it on the grounds that I said "in my opinion".

So do land-line telephones, websites, and Furbies. None of them are "intelligent". The only thing we have to fear from Google is ethical violations (which are a valid concern), not that it will ever become intelligent. You are really just reinforcing the point: so far no attempts at creating "artificial intelligence" actually work, and the things that actually work aren't anything like artificial intelligence.

You've ignored a critical distinction between "websites" and "spam filtering".

The former follows a specific human-designed set of instructions to serve up deterministic content in the manner intended.

The creator of the latter doesn't even know its final behavior. That programmer wrote a schema that allows for classification of information, which the end user trains, and exactly what it ends up doing depends on the subset of an incomprehensibly huge problem space it gets to see up to any particular decision it makes.

Cool trick, BTW - Did you know you can train your spam filter to do things totally unrelated to spam? For laughs, about five years ago I trained one to recognize male vs female authors from RSS feeds. Did pretty well, too, I got it over 80%, but beside the point - It "learned" something that its creator never had any intention of it doing.

That doesn't mean I'll name my spam filter and carry on a cheesy romance with it, but it most certainly does use AI techniques.

I'd like to suggest that those are not samples of actual AI. At least not in the sense that anyone with a serious background in AI would consider them to be.

I respectfully disagree, in that the "AI community" doesn't have a single unified viewpoint. In fact, they have pretty tidily bifurcated into two major camps.

One group says that "real" AI needs to pass the Turing test, needs to think like us, needs to recognize its own consciousness, needs the ability to tell a joke.

The other group has given us voice recognition, spam filtering, NetFlix recommendations, Google, and countless other "AI lite" technologies; technologies that might not have the ability to discuss Nietzsche with us, but unlike "real" AI, they actually work.

You cherry-picked your quote.

When TFS explicitly says "that's not allowed, presumably because Apple doesn't want iOS to serve as a drone controller", I don't think you can really accuse the GP of cherry-picking to make his point.

How does this not violate these stores' agreements with Visa (etc), which have explicitly partnered with Apple and Google to provide Pay and Wallet as a valid method of using their (virtual) cards at the register?

And worse than simply not accepting it, they did so because they plan to come up with their own competing product??? WTF, Rite Aid, do you really think people will rush to use yet another crappy store-specific solution, rather than look confused at the cashier for a few seconds before walking away, leaving their stuff at the register?