Arizona has an isolated power grid now?

Have you ever been to youtube? The chat is just like a concentrated version of the standard comment idiocy on that site.

From TFA: "Nationally renowned astronomer Bob Berman will host the four-hour spectacle with live audio narration starting at 2:00 PM EDT/11:00 AM PDT. He will be joined by several guests throughout the show, including Duncan Copp, a presenter for BBC and National Geographic and director-producer of many astronomy films and TV shows including "In the Shadow of the Moon", an award-wining film about the Apollo astronauts."

This is the same thing that I keep telling the fearmongers who react to every mention of "nuclear energy" by saying "what about Chernobyl OMG". The RBMK reactor was basically designed by idiots who didn't give a shit about the concept of a "containment vessel". All of the "news articles" that keep flipping out about this are really making me sick. Yes, it was a tragedy; yes, the human consequences will last for a very, very, very long time. Yes, it's completely under-reported. I give you that. But these "journalists" really need to stop making completely unfounded comparisons, because they're just encouraging people to revert to being dumb, panicky animals, who can't actually apply the laws of physics and basic engineering principles.

But then again... if people in general were capable of feats of that magnitude, we'd solve a lot of problems. Ugh. Time to crawl back into my cave.

I don't think it's possible to communicate how slowly this runs on the (original) MyTouch3G. At least in my experience, it took 5-10 seconds for it to recognize that I had even started a word - when it finally did, it took another 5 seconds to trace it out. Something is obviously wrong here, there can't be any way it's supposed to be this slow. As I'm not that enthralled with the idea, I don't have the inclination to figure it out, so whatever. Honestly, I've had problems with apps (and the OS in general) being non-responsive in the past, but this is a whole new level.

Can't we go back to regulating them as common carriers and cut this "information service" crap?

I don't know how it works exactly, but I assume it's similar to a public/private keypair given that they describe it as a cryptographic mechanism.

Given the author of the Python files in the SVN repo, this might not be a bad guess:

# post_election_audit.py
# Ronald L. Rivest
# October 4, 2009
#
# This Python program is for use with the Scantegrity II election system.
# See www.scantegrity.org for information on Scantegrity II.

...Cavtel (for some reason, the only DSL available in my office building, even though I can see the Verizon CO 1000 yards away from my window) does this same BS and it drives me nuts, I just changed the DNS servers returned by our DHCP box and voila.

Broken, and boneheaded, but solved with a small amount of work. Still, it's something I shouldn't have had to bother with, and the whole "breaking the Internet" thing is a problem -- they should no longer be able to classify themselves as an "Internet Service Provider" since they're not doing a reasonable job at it.

...or just pull up the music video on YouTube and "listen" to that. Although downright offensive to anyone who considers audio quality important, it seems that this is perfectly acceptable in most cases -- especially where the intent is just to share a song with someone else. ...but then again, in that light, it seems that YouTube is cast as a sort of viral music marketing -- which becomes a strange beastie, far beyond the proportions of this post (especially since this has already gone several levels OT with respect to the original post...)

EXACTLY THIS.

I remember a Packard Bell Pentium 166 MMX (woah! serious business!) that had 2 USB ports. I had ABSOLUTELY NO EARTHLY IDEA what the flying fsck they were (likely because it shipped with Windows 95).

The next computer I had was an early Pentium III (Slot-I P3 repraSENT!) and it came with USB... speakers. USB F$CKING SPEAKERS. (Granted, they also had a 3.5mm plug for the audio connection, but you could control the volume and audio balance in software! Holy sh&t!) It was incredible at the time.

...and then it was 2000 and USB was everywhere, game over.

No one's mentioned They Might Be Giants' "Spiraling Shape" yet? What kind of Slashdot is this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byM95deNcdI

Yahoo? Wasn't that some page at Stanford? (Disclaimer: I'm 24; I remember loading the original URL on a 2400bps modem; and yes, it was the hot thing back in the day.) Yes, it's outrageous for them to do this with no real warning or 'gradual transfer' to the new format (and especially for them to not carry over the old data into the new format -- really? are you kidding me?) but I'm more intrigued by the backlash; in a social circle of my contemporaries, I can't think of anyone who is seriously concerned with Yahoo.