A streaming service that offers more than the usual EU/US crap had to end sooner or later. This seemed to be pretty much the only service in the western world with a decent enough selection of Japanese and Korean music.

it was the sales droid who lied - it is him who should be castigated for lieing - presumably to earn a few extra $ commission or bonus. All those who were conned into paying for something that they did not need should be able to seek compensation from the sales droid - the fine NOT to be paid by Verison. The droid's manager and managers all the way up should have to pay in proportion to their take home pay.

Unless there are consequences it will happen again. Not much different from the bankers who caused the rest of us so much pain and, by & large, have escaped personal penalties.

Microsoft has an "Open License" which allows you to look at Windows NT source code. it's "open", yes? pay them $USD 1m per year, you get an "open" look at the source code of Windows NT. but if you ever dare to use it, talk about it, or do ANYTHING other than *read* it.... they will sue the fuck out of you.

bottom line: can we PLEASE stop using the word "open" in context with these types of stupid, stupid proprietary arrangements? it really isn't helping.

there are plenty of *LIBRE* licensed implementations of MIPS out there: many people have pointed that out (in comments i can see above this one), they're on http://opencores.org/ - there are at least eight MIPS core implementations that i can see, there, possibly the best one (most complete) is this: http://opencores.org/project,m... which has a 5-stage pipeline and a harvard architecture.

so please, stop using the word "open" to refer to proprietary, restricted and patented material.

The work that lazy ass "I'm too good for that..." bastards won't do... While drinking Schlitz by the gallon on their trailer home porches

1) Tell us that it is not effective; thus we need not worry about loss of privacy; thus we might we well let them continue ?

2) It is not effective because they have not got enough money for XXX; so: please Mr congress critter - vote them some more money

3) It is not effective; you need not worry about encrypting your communications; hopefully enough idiots will believe that!

Pick one of the above or come out with more suggestions.

I believe he had nothing to say and said it anyway.

He apparently didn't read the history of the rocket science comment and landed WAY FAR off.

SpaceX doesn't qualify for the statement. They are building improved technology to go places in space, but he blindly used a comment that specifically was intended as a comparison against the initial space age where we were clueless and entering blindly to achieve something believed impossible with no fore-knowledge. SpaceX, while awesome doesn't fit his reference.

Kinda sad. Some people can be so clueless. More important isn't the could. Should Tesla flood the planet with their toxic batteries

my concern is that Tesla has no interest in using recycled lithium and favors landfill for lithium waste. They are intentionally poisoning our planet foe aeons.

Is he suggesting that as the rest of the industry abandons PCs to move into better solutions, he intends to remain hellbent on a known to be a technology which is obsolete?

Maybe he should try selling typewriter ribbons too

Was any attempt made to correlate people's views with the propaganda^w news sources that they viewed/read the most?

the issue that i have with "artificial" intelligence is this: there *is* no such thing as "artificial" - i.e. "fake" or "unreal" intelligence. intelligence just *IS*. no matter the form it takes, if it's "intelligent" then it is pure and absolute arrogance on our part to call it "artificial". the best possible subsitute words that i could come up with were "machine-based" intelligence. the word "simulated" cannot be applied, because, again, if it's intelligent, it just *is* - and, again, to imply that intelligence is "simulated" is, again, a direct falsehood. so we have a bit of a problem, there.

the other problem is this: if those who are creating intelligent machines are themselves of insufficient intelligence to recognise the existence of intelligence, then how on earth would they know that it had actually been created?? it's the "million monkeys" problem in a subtle new light.

but i think people are beginning to confuse "intelligence" with "consciousness". we already have intelligent networks - the next phase is CONSCIOUSNESS. self-awareness. and here we begin to get into interesting territory, not least because we have the very pertinent question "how can scientists who are themselves not truly consciously aware even of themselves possibly begin to *recognise* consciousness when they've created it??"

the problem is highlighted by the example of a friend of mine who refuses to help create machine consciousness. he's a researcher into the concept of consciousness, so he knows what goes into it - how to recognise it, and, by inference, how to make consciousness "happen" so to speak. and when i approached him about helping to make machine consciousness, he said, "sure i can help... but only if you can guarantee that the resultant beings would be in bliss (i.e. happy) rather than being permanently tortured".

and there you have the key, that anything that is self-aware and conscious - anything that has the ability to communicate and feel - *automatically* gains the right to freedom of expression and all the other rights that we *believe* humans - as the arrogant self-appointed "top of the food chain" - should also have... ... and until the arrogant quotes artificial quotes intelligence community recognises that and fights *IN ADVANCE* for the right of machine consciousness to have the same rights as humans, nobody who is a truly conscious and intelligent being is going to help that scientific community to create such advanced conscious beings, because the risks associated with such conscious machines being tortured - just because the scientists think they can - are too great.

this is nothing new: i believe the same study was the basis of the famous book "Outliers", which is a fascinating study of what makes people successful. if i recall correctly, it's completely the opposite of what people expect: your genes *do* matter. your attitude *does* matter. your circumstances *do* matter. working hard *does* matter. and luck matters as well. but it's all of these things - luck, genetics, circumstances *and* hard work - that make for the ultimate success story. bill gates is one of the stories described. he had luck and opportunity - by being born at just the right time when personal computing was beginning - and circumstances - by going to one of the very very few schools in the USA that actually had a computer available (for me, that opportunity was when i was 8: i went to one of the very very few secondary schools in the UK that had a computer: a Pet 3032).

so, yeah - it's not a very popular view, particularly in the USA, as it goes against the whole "anyone can make it big" concept. but, put simply, the statistics show that it's a combination of a whole *range* of factors, all of which contribute, that make up success. just "being intelligent" simply is not enough.

From the penultimate paragraph:

When the last star in the Universe flickers out, those photons—long since shifted into the radio and having diluted to be less than one-per-cubic-kilometer—will still be there in just as great an abundance as they were trillions and quadrillions of years prior.

and that is all that there will be left --- according to current theories at any rate!

What happens if you are listening to a radio play while driving ... and a scary bit happens so your face reflects this. Will it put the brakes on because it thinks that there is something wrong ?

Dear NSA,

I would love to design the phone that you are asking for. please pay the sum of $USD 30 million into my bank account and i will organise it straight away. also, please sign a contract that you will subsidise the cost of every single phone sold because in order to add the extra encryption that you are expecting it will push up the price, and in a competitive business world nobody would buy it without subsidies.

I look forward to hearing from you shortly.

Signed, Luke Leighton
(Libre and FSF-Endorseable Hardware Design Engineer)

Surely the case should be against the film studios that made the films and not Netflix which is just distributing them ?