"Forcing" in what way? For me, only recently did Firefox start allowing the HTML5 player for videos that roll ads.

Probably because partner videos and claimed videos tend to use Flash even on PCs set to use HTML5.

Without Flash, what's the preferred way to deploy vector animations of the sort seen on Homestar Runner, Weebl's Stuff, Newgrounds, Dagobah, and Albino Blacksheep, without bloating them by a factor of 10 by rendering them to WebM?

That depends. Do you live in a country where Google's Music Key service is available?

Slashdot uses HTTPS for subscribers.

As for non-subscribers: Using HTTP advertisements in an HTTPS page won't work due to browsers' mixed content policy. This means Slashdot's HTTPS support is unlikely to be extended to non-subscribers until more major ad networks support HTTPS.

I don't need to give Google anymore access to my data thanks. Whoever dreamed up this scheme at Google must've earned a bonus or two. "Hey guys, it won't matter which OS or web mail service or social network users use if *we* own the ISPs!"

There'd be precedent for that in the European Union. England had a law in effect from 1571 through 1597 to make failure to wear a British-made wool cap in public a crime.

I was under the impression that even automakers had a statute of limitations for product defects. Or would someone have grounds to sue Ford over a defect in the Model T?

"How do you get probable cause when everything up to the actual act is planned and discussed over the internet." The same way the cops did it before the Internet existed. Look, the police didn't listen to every single phone call between 1920 and 1995 to try to find crimes that were being planned on the phone. They didn't even listen in to every conversation in every pool hall and dive bar trying to find people planning crimes. What you do is you work off tips from the public, you solve crimes that have already been committed, and you get out on the street and patrol and know your neighborhood and create an environment that isn't conducive to crime. You seem to think that the job of the police is to prevent every crime from ever being committed. This isn't Minority Report son. We can't stop them all before they happen. Personally, I'd rather have a few crimes occur and not live in a surveillance state thanks.

I'm Canadian. I'm not British. And I take offense at the idea that I could be. Fuck the Queen.

Because most users think they need to be online just to read web documents, certain cellular companies in the US are raking in beaucoup bucks. Time is money, but I'd rather spend four hours of my time once and then not have to spend it again the rest of the year rather than waste $400 a year on a data plan.

I never tried looking for it. I just tried five minutes ago, but it turns out that a randomly chosen article from Cracked.com doesn't appear to contain the word "print" at all. I guess what my homemade reader does is prepare (and cache) a printable version of new articles. I'm also aware of other sites such as Ars Technica that charge per year for access to printable versions.

I expressed my dissatisfaction with the site's lazy loading practice on the site's forum. But despite my best attempt at being thorough and polite, I got modded down.

My point is that if you don't buy any Ubisoft products, then there's no way for you to get F'd by Ubisoft's policy. It's not like Ubisoft is a platform gatekeeper or anything.

Or do you assume the rest of us have already redd it?

(See also the corrected submission.)

On this particular site, I would prefer the images to load when I load the page and the comments to load when I follow the "View Comments" link. So I spent some time writing an RSS reader that implements this behavior, transforming the attribute that the lazy loading engine uses into the src= attribute and dropping elements outside the main article. But I'm an edge case; most people won't have the expertise for that option.

You still have the ballot box. Vote against Ubisoft with your euros, dollars, or whatever: stop buying Ubisoft games. Buy games in the same genre from their competitors and email your purchases (and reasoning) to Ubisoft support.