And when people can't identify the movie? Because you know, everyone has seen every movie... Naturally...

I generally don't have a problem with CAPTCHAs, as it has gotten to the point where it is now rare to sign up to anything on the web and not encounter a CAPTCHA, and generally they're easy enough to get past so I just don't find them a big deal.

However, when I do have a problem with CAPTCHAs is when they're ridiculously hard to pass because they're so horribly obfuscated. For example the CAPTCHA that MegaUpload currently use. I cannot for the life of me successfully get past it, and have yet to succeed a single time, and so have sworn off using their website anymore because it is just too much of a hassle.

The only reason any of us are even posting comments on this story is to get the April Fools achievement...

I'm just being honest about it.

This isn't entirely accurate. Base installations of source game servers don't easily allow for this, even if you have RCON. However if they've installed a third party server administration addon, such as Mani Admin for Counter-Strike Source, etc, where there is a command called ma_browse, which allows users to bring up websites in the MOTD window, admins with sufficient access can use the ma_cexec command to force players to bring up websites using the ma_browse command, but the majority of servers (I.E. the well run ones) do not give out this kind of functionality to most of their admins.

Really, it's not a huge deal, and you barely ever see it happen, and I mean, what's to stop someone changing their server's MOTD to a simple HTML page with a bunch of gay porn pictures or something else most people find unpleasant to have forced upon them? Power has the potential to corrupt, the way I see it, it's not very different than if the admin were to slay people or set his health or give himself guns, or anything else.

So did Tech Dirt copy Slashdot? Did they both copy someone else?

Wow, I never even noticed those little department subtitles on /. before... Are they new? Am I just blind? I know they've been on Tech Dirt for a long time, did /. copy TD? Or vice versa? Or did they botch copy the idea from elsewhere?

Would such a clause actually hold up in court? I just can't see how it possibly would, it's purely "You're damned if you do you're damned if you don't.

In this case, if you simply left, they kept all your content, if you wanted to delete your account, you need to log in to do so, thus accepting the new TOS, allowing them to keep all your content, I thought one of the conditions for a binding contract was that is was under no duress, and this clause appear to be inescapable.

Why don't they just modify the old TOS to say something along the lines of:
"When you delete your account, only your profile content will be deleted."
To cover the issues such as:
If you send a message to a user, and then you delete your account, they don't need to delete the message from you in that person's inbox
Or, if you submitted a picture via the graffiti app etc, they don't need to delete your entry on the other person's profile, etc.

Hey, sometimes being and asshole also WORKS.

Recently here in New Zealand with our ISP Snap (Which is actually really very good the majority of the time, and far far better than every other ISP available) we had our internet go down, and it was because they kept insisting on us to pay for the month in advance.

(This wasn't the first time we'd be disconnected for this reason.)

So we ring the up and tell them our connection was down, they explain to us that our bill for the next month was over due and they had cut us off and we needed to make our next advance payment. So we hang up on the guy and go to do that...

Oh...

Wait...

Can't internet bank, without...

Y'know...

The internet

So we ring them back up, and after half an hour of arguing with a couple of the techs, a guy from accounting and their manager over whether or not we could access the bank's website even though we'd been cut off, they realise their filter is broken, so they actually manage to get that working, so we hang up, and go to make the payment...

Oh...

Wait

It's the WEEKEND, the money isn't going to go through until MONDAY, it's saturday morning. So we ring them back up and point this out to them, and so after about another hour arguing with the techs etc over why these policies were dumb, asking why we got cut off on a WEEKEND when we couldn't make a payment, and why we never recieved any notification that we were going to be cut off, and how we were running a business and in the middle of a couple of court cases and not very happy at all that we had no internet when we really needed to send and recieve crucial emails, one of the techies rings, and wakes up a director, who then gets in touch with the CEO, who supposedly came in to personally re-enable our connection, and abolish these new policies which were obviously garbage.

So I felt really bad for getting impatient, and frustrated with these techies and treating them kinda crappily, specially since they were just doing their job, and following the new policies etc, ontop of that Snap hire REAL qualified tech support, who tend to know what they're talking about, get on top of the problem, and not dick you around, as oposed to Telecom and Orcon's Asian/Indian thick accented script readers...
But hey, it got everything sorted out right?

Yes, but I was not implying that there would be a situation without any users on Google, just pointing out that Google still uses A LOT of bandwidth even if you take the users out of the equation hypothetically. Even if these ISPs were to start blocking Google outright, Google would not see a decrease in users as the majority of Joe-blow internet users see Google as "The Intenet" would kick up a huge stink until they got it back, moved to another ISP or found a way to circumvent the block. Point is, the ISPs are wrong, and this whole story is stupid.

Well, not exactly, without the users, Google still uses a fair chunk of badwidth, indexing and caching websites, but if that were a problem: robots.txt

They think Google is being unfair, block it outright. Why haven't they done this? Because they know that 1) They're in the wrong and 2) They would lose just about all of their customers You know there's more to it when the simple and obvious solution is not employed, and then forgotten about. Google is what the consumers want, the consumers have paid for their internet connection, as have Google, end of story? Hah I wish.