There's also lots of stats you can find out there that back up that not only do the cheaper non-3D ones sell better, but that when people do buy a 3D TV it wasn't the 3D feature they bought it for, and they didn't see it as a positive.

I always knew the majority of people didn't care about 3D, but I'd still like to think it's not going away anytime soon. Surely there's enough of a die-hard market that high-end TVs will still include a 3D option? I can only hope. Admittedly, I don't watch a lot of movies in 3D, but games are a different story. Games can be so much more immersive when played in 3D.

If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominoes should fall like a house of cards. Checkmate!

Oh, how I wish I had moderator points.

Now that I understood. I am actually a little interested to see what kinds of experiments they do along these lines. It seems like string theorists might actually have the opportunity to predict behaviors that the standard model cannot. Unless it just ends up being some previously unknown new elementary bosons... but we already got Higgs. Do we really need more elementary bosons?

I'm not exactly sure I followed what happened, and I read the dumbed down version. I don't see how this isn't an extreme case of superposition, but I'm not clear on what they did. They split a stream of neutrons into an upper beam with spin going forward and a lower beam with spin going backward. They did stuff to the lower beam that didn't happen to the upper beam? And it keeps mentioning recombining the beams but I didn't quite catch what profound result that had. Can somebody who follows this please explain it?

Let's go already! --Bender

It was a joke, but if we are going to take it seriously it is certainly not out of the realm of possibility for an ISP to redirect a specific URL to a different URL. Just get the 404 page from the site and redirect it there as it passes through the provider's network gear. Similar process to the one used by internet providers in countries that have mandatory blacklists for "pirate" sites.

Thank God. I was completely convinced you were dead serious. I always laugh when I see somebody feed a troll or miss such an obvious joke, but I guess it still happens to me every once in a while too.

As for what's possible, I had considered spoofing a 404 page in the US by a US corporation against another US corporation over an issue the NSA probably doesn't care about too unlikely and confusing to mention to such an obvious n00b. :) Anyway, I actually hit Post too soon. I meant to mention how it was probably just the slashdot effect and how much funnier that is than if Verizon was responsible. I know the capacity of Level 3's web server says nothing about their network infrastructure, but I still find it hilarious. (I'd use the word ironic, but now I'm afraid you'd know I was using it incorrectly.)

But, but, but... regulation is the antithesis of the Capitaist way that our republican Democracy has weaned its children on since it was formed!!

I do tend to agree though - regulation of ISPs is probably the only way to deal with this.

That is basically the way I see it, too. Capitalism works extremely well as long as there is real competition. It fails miserably when there is no competition and when that happens, strict regulation is needed. Nobody seems to understand that anymore. There is no middle ground in regulating a free market. It has to be black or white because when it's gray, somebody is getting screwed. The absolute worst thing that you can do to an economy is half-assed regulation. You get artificial, government sanctioned monopolies that, as all monopolies ever have always done, abuse their power.

And sure enough, on one side, you've got Democrats writing laws requiring that whatever industry their biggest contributor is in has to do certain things a particular way (which happens to be the way their biggest donor already does things and most of their competitors don't because it's pathetically inefficient or lazy, or how their biggest contributor would like to do things so they can charge more), all for the little guy's rights or the victim's safety or whatever, while the Republicans defend that same donor's (who, coincidentally, is also their biggest contributor) right to continue abusing the new or expanded monopoly (or trust) they just received from the aforementioned Democrat's new law, in defense of the free market. Everybody sees them on TV, fighting ravenously to defend their principles, but fails to notice that both of them just gave their corporate sponsors exactly what they wanted, at the public's expense.

And that is precisely why we're screwed. Most of the people who aren't too lazy to stop watching TV to get out and vote end up voting for one of the two clowns they saw duking it out on TV. Anybody left who realizes just how badly we're being screwed has given up and stays home and watches TV.

Your ISP isn't Verizon by chance is it?

No, if he's getting a 404, there's a connection to the server. Would be hilarious if Verizon had something to do with it, but we can't pin that one on them.

Find locations where you will hurt Verizon customers, and cut the cables. Do so publicly. Precondition repair on upgrades of Verizon's network as you direct. If Verizon doesn't want network neutrality, then punish their customers.

I wish it was that simple, but I'm on board with the general idea. I wouldn't publicly cut the cables. That's too extreme. I would, however, like to see Level 3 turn the tables and publicly (as noisily as possible) accuse Verizon of using up all their bandwidth and that if Verizon doesn't help them pay for the costs of upgrading, their customers just won't be able to watch Netflix anymore. "I don't see why Verizon is taking issue with this. It's standard practice. People download a lot of video from us. Remember folks, we're not downloading from them! Verizon's users are downloading from us! They're the ones using all the traffic!" (I know that's a completely inaccurate and misleading explanation of the situation - an outright lie, if you will - but that's the point.)

If Verizon customer's thought "Who's Level 3? Netflix is paying them so I can watch Netflix, and now they want to charge Verizon money so I can watch Netflix? So basically I'm getting charged twice to watch Netflix? This will not stand!"

Then when everybody has turned their heads in their direction, Level 3 would say, "Just kidding! Here's what's really going on..." and tell people a simplified version of what they said in TFA. Then maybe people would start to care about net neutrality. (If you were to replace Level 3 with Netflix themselves, it would oh, so much better!)

Of course, it's a good thing I'm not in charge of either company because I'd have just lost an unprecedented amount of business and ruined the company's reputation in the process, and unfortunately, the average person isn't going to respond a calm, well-reasoned, fact-based argument like TFA. Most people just aren't going to care as long as there's something playing on TV. When you get in the way of that, people will definitely notice, but anybody even remotely involved in such an affair will be ruined for life.

I live in the US and can say this is never going to change. The internet was not always international, and when it opened up to the public, .com implicitly meant the US. There are still tons of Americans who don't know a .us ccTLD even exists, and no two registrants can share a 2nd level domain in .us. There is a .co.uk but .co.us belongs to the state of Colorodo, and only one person/entity can register something similar like .com.us, so sharing a 2nd-level TLD isn't an option without a middleman. In fact, 2nd level domain registration wasn't even allowed for the public at first, so sites like google.us couldn't exist. Google had to go with .com (Google could have made a case for .net, but back then, .net belonged to ISPs and the like and people didn't jump over to that TLD until we started running out of .com's). Once 2nd-level domain names in the .us TLD opened up to the public, a lot of sites that were already well established haven't bothered to register (or at least maintain) a .us domain because everybody already has their original .com address memorized (so for example, there is no amazon.us). Kind of circular problem, you see? Companies don't use .us because people don't know about it, and people don't know about it because nobody uses it. Not going to change anytime soon.

The question: is it enough to save BlackBerry in the consumer market, or is it too little, too late?

How long has it been since BlackBerry has had more than a negligible share of the consumer market? These days, they seem to be almost exclusively enterprise. Seriously, the last time I can think of that anybody I know who bought their own BlackBerry was like 7 years ago. Who is using BlackBerry for personal use?

being able to lock a person up for 6 months as opposed to 30 years and getting the same result might be a good thing.

I hit Submit too soon. I should add that this would absolutely need to be completely voluntary. You can't tinker with somebody's brain without permission, especially as punishment. That's just wrong.

That's ridiculous. If we wanted to cause as much damage to the criminals as possible, why not simply reinstate torture?

You missed part of it. "Is it really OK to lock someone up for the best part of the only life they will ever have, or might it be more humane to tinker with their brains and set them free?" Yes, you can inflict longer sentences for more severe cases, but they have more of their lifespan left when they get done serving their sentence. Don't get me wrong, I think 1000 year sentences are both cruel and unusual, but being able to lock a person up for 6 months as opposed to 30 years and getting the same result might be a good thing.

They are fundamentally unverifiable as long as you are inside them. Of course, if you can ever escape your simulation, that suggests duality... On that note, Descartes did not believe reality was an illusion and yet he believed in duality. They seem mutually exclusive to me.

I believe you are thinking of 6 * 9.