That's a lot of careful consideration that you just applied to only yourself and not to all those dead people.
That is in fact exactly the opposite of what I'm doing. I'm applying the same standards to everyone. You want to apply different standards to different people.
It's kind of interesting to see such a large and relatively modern society lose it's collective mind over gay people.
It's just another incident which maintains my faith in humanity... poor faith, perhaps, but faith nonetheless. I have faith that when things get difficult, people will look for anywhere to point a finger except at themselves.
FRAND would be the most sane thing to do.
The most sane thing to do would be to restore the original term for Copyright. Life moves faster now, but copyrights expire slower. That is obviously bullshit.
And they're probably torrenting higher video bit rates, too.
Not just that, but Netflix is overcompressed as compared to the genuine HD video sources. Torrents have gotten bigger than Netflix streams faster, but Netflix has eclipsed torrents.
As a long-time Comcast customer it seems to me things are going in the other direction - better! They had a 250GB cap for a while and then gave up on it.
They had a 90GB cap for a while, and then gave up on it! Guess I was a Comcast customer before you. This was before they had a page that would tell you when you went over the cap, and before you could get a front-line employee to tell you what the cap was. The third guy I talked to finally spilled the beans, and I finally stopped getting letters from Comcast when I stopped going over 90. This was probably a decade ago now, my god we've had cable internet a long time and yet where I live now I'm still on a shitty WISP with a 1-1.5Mbps connection.
I do dream bigger.
I'd rather send a bunch more people up there and fuck the real-time video and bandwidth.
We're supposed to be colonising, not annexing Facebook.
Hell, that's better than some outlying regions of Scotland have got for their "broadband" Internet connections.
Why do humans need real-time video communication on Mars? It won't be real-time. Mars is 3 light-minutes away from Earth. The best we can hope for is a 6 minute lag between you asking a question and getting an answer.
And if you're going to have a six-minute lag, pretty much the bandwidth is irrelevant. It might as well be by the cheapest way possible, i.e. audio only with the occasional static picture for the "What the hell is this in the microscope?" questions.
The sheer bandwidth is also the problem. At 6 minute latencies, you're basically introducing more and more "buffers" to ensure correct data transmission. You won't know if what you sent was received properly until six minutes later. So you have to store AT LEAST six minutes of data (more likely lots more as you will have to retransmit).
The more bandwidth you wish to buffer, the larger storage that six minutes costs you. Six minutes of audio is nothing. A few hundred Kb. Six minutes of video is more. Six minutes of HD video is more again. And so on. And everything that you store / forward costs BIG money over interplanetary scales - from the broadcasting station itself (which can't reasonably ever be upgraded) to the DSN satellies around Mars to the receiving stations on Earth, and the more you send and the more you store and the faster you want to do it, the more it costs EVERYWHERE.
And, as you state, there is NO scientific value in this. So until humans are on the planet, it's really moot. But once they are there, HD video is the least of their concerns.
This is probably why you're not Director of Planetary Exploration at NASA, by the way.
This reminds me of a joke I once heard an actress tell:
Q:How do you tell the dumbest actress on a movie set?
A:She's the one who's sleeping with the writer.
That depends on your tastes...
Er... it hasn't.
It's responded with "No Comment" like it has for just about every media outlet that has ever asked it.
It might even be legally bound to reply to "press enquiries", in whatever form. I'm pretty sure if I wrote them a letter, they would reply. Most likely with a similar response.
Just because they're spies does not mean they don't have a press office and/or a secretary who just fobs off anyone who asks. Hell, you can get replies from Santa if you post them in a Royal Mail postbox (even if you don't address the letter, but just put "To Santa" and have a return address!).
A response means nothing. The response given means nothing (it literally means "I have received your letter. I have no response").
Call me back when there's a story.
When they enable IPv6 and stop publishing IPv6 stories, most probably.
I have a hard time believing that someone convinced them this site was worthwhile.
That's because you're letting your ego get in the way. This isn't about you. This is about one or more specific targets that they believed or suspected were slashdot users.
Software production is assumed to be a line function, but it is run like a staff function. -- Paul Licker
