People do not choose to have their pay withheld. You're no better than people who try to excuse muslim enslavement of their housekeepers by claiming "Well, the housekeepers CHOOSE to work there." Same energy, same result, same bullshit.

Very few people seem to know that making these kinds of arguments doesn't somehow erase the fact that what is happening in China right now is still wrong.

we make use of the notion of entropy, a measure of randomness that was invented for this application by Claudia Diaz

Uh huh... and I make use of the notion of flaming, a measure of disbelief that was invented for this application by Slashdot.

Sounds like a way to squeeze people who choose Macintosh.

So, the web is not the Internet. ISPs are not the Internet. Basically anything that contradicts your version of events isn't the Internet. Got it.

Seriously, please log off. People with IQs above room temperature are trying to dial in.

If you change the definition of what a thing is, then you change the history of that thing. The Internet is a specific thing, and basically if it wasn't interconnected via TCP/IP, it was pre-Internet. Those BBSes weren't early ISPs because ISP is Internet Service Provider... unless they were one of the late era BBSes that were accessible via TCP/IP from... the Internet. They weren't the origin.

Some of the largest BBSs became ISPs. That was the point. They built up a community, a new thing came along, and they adapted. This isn't some guy giving out "alternative facts"... it's you not knowing what you're talking about.

Not reading the article I can understand, but shooting off your mouth without having read the book? Seriously? He goes in depth to how bulletin board systems provided the earliest social networking services and all the other services of the internet we take for granted today, and how the larger among them eventually became early ISPs after the first commercial internet exchanges opened up. I'd say that puts him slightly ahead of someone who just wanted a chance to spout off.

Now log off. Someone important is trying to connect. NO CARRIER

That's half the problem, though... history was written by a bunch of carpetbaggers who came after sysops had already built the first commercial internet service providers and were too busy actually running the place to notice history being rewritten around them. I've actually got a copy of the book in question and from someone who was there at the time it's a good start (although admittedly I'm only two chapters in so my opinion could change later). In any event the history you're talking about is history most people simply don't know... which is the whole point of the book.

Because the compression quality on GSM codecs is absolute garbage. It's not just the bandwidth. Just give me a 64 kbps POTS stream. Problem fucking solved.

...POTS quality audio instead of shitty GSM codecs that make everyone sound like a cross between a walrus and a turkey. For fuck's sake it's 2022 and we've all got more than enough bandwidth... would it really kill anybody to demand a straight 64kbps uncompressed audio stream instead of this crap?

Not so much pickleball but the old pickle and balls.

Worse than fetch. Gretchen could make fetch happen. This is Bill we're talking about.

....Pickleball is not a meme. You're not going to force it into popularity, Bill. Get over yourself.

Anyone who tells you not to use Wikipedia has no idea how the internet works.

Good thing I didn't say that then. What I did say was...

Never, ever rely on a Wikipedia for anything. Always go to primary sources.

...is the fact that there are hundreds of Zhemao on all wikis. This is what happens when you let any asshole edit your pages without providing a shred of actual evidence for anything they write. Never, ever rely on a Wikipedia for anything. Always go to primary sources.