It's simple: assure an ISP that any "competing" ISP that follows them will not offer prices, services, or data restrictions substantially better than theirs; et voila, cable and/or fiber.

Cartels and de facto monopolies are what seems to get them building these days.

I'm less worried about "hipsters" so much as mix-and-match executives. (Did that CEO do well in MegaBankConglom? Great, let's hire him for AuctionNet or PCMaker! Never mind that he has no tech experience, his ethics are both questionable and unfit for an internet company, and he was probably really brought in by MegaBank to turn them into a reality-TV producer and soften them for a future M&A all Elop-like...)

If all you have is a Nobel Prize in Economics, everything looks like an expense.

I don't mind my desktop or laptop hooked up via IPv6.

I do mind my fridge or power grid hooked up and controllable via IPvVERSION_NUMBER. I really don't need another reason to find my fridge doors suddenly full of ads, or my freezer's ice cube trays suddenly melted, or my bedroom suddenly ill-HVAC'd, or my Northeast US suddenly dark...yet again...

I thought this sounded like a dupe*, but Red Flag Linux is apparently not a Chinese government project as I began to think for some reason**.

*On China's part, not Slashdot's!

**Like, totally not because of the name or anything. ;)

"Let me be perfectly clear, as clear as the frosted glass of your light bulb."

We could probably replace Dan Patrick with Danica Patrick and still end up with a better system.

The Gaze Tracking Library is released under version 3 of the GPL, to be exact.

Enjoy your one-week domain name free-trial settlement coupons.

(Not transferable to other_registrar, of course.)

I liked Winamp because it looped audio (when playing a single track on repeat, of course, and if the file was made to loop in the first place) quite nicely (even certain mp3s, I think...this was back in my old ytmnd days so I may just be lying entirely; I know WAVs looped like a charm). Neither VLC nor Windows Media Player really bother to try to loop.* Also for playing around with the various visualizers (AVS, Milkdrop and such).

Granted, I actually got into the player pretty late, and some prefer the older versions for various reasons (less bloat, not AOL, the old skin, etcetcetc). But I liked it and its little about box 3D credits thinger.

*Sometimes I could actually hear the audio loop back for juuuuust so long in WiMP, but then the audio cuts to zero for about as long and the file starts over for real. :/

Don't be so hard on poor O'Donovan. I don't know how to get those newfangled "Tweat" things on Prodigy or CompuServe either.

Netflix, in its old life as a small Blockbuster-fighting DVD-maiing rebel is already dead, after a bout of insanity in apparent pursuit of dark knowledge and money. Its current form, ostensibly an independent being but truly a zombie* raised by the vile magicks of Big Media, aims for exclusive deals with cable providers (who just happen to be ISPs) and to make its own content** as an excuse to lobby for tougher copyright. I would avoid touching the shambling corpse, lest you come down with something and be damned to eternal unrest, availability excuses that involve repeated chants of "distributors", "market segmentation", and "contracts", and high fees.

*It didn't quite manage lichform, but almost certainly tried.

**Which would lead to the whole "doing DRM'd streaming video by breaking HTML5 with DRM-friendly extensions" thing, if HTML5 was a stable or good standard in any sense but name.

Speaking of spaceships, I found it fun to contrast these fake code uses with one in the game Starbound (got it a day or few after it hit Steam as an Early Access game). When you obtain enough fuel (like coal) from your current planet there and send it back to your spaceborne ship, you can take it to another planet and enjoy a flashy warp sequence with code that scrolls on a screen. The code shown is that of...the warp sequence. (Starbound is a C++ game, and you'll notice fun things in the display like uint64_t and class names.)

Granted, it's almost certainly not a true quine, as it uses only a portion of the code; said code is in PNG form, not text; and I doubt the display will be updated for each patch, especially this early in development.

We need to make the undocumented workers legal so they can be taxed.

Exactly. (If you meant that in sarcasm, you're more right than you think.) Our government (feebly attempts to) turn back lots of good taxpayers who just want a decent wage and standard of living. We can put public records (and, yes, the NSA) to good use: gather info on the immigrants before they attempt to enter, and when they try and if they are able to learn our history without posing an imminent threat to lives, make them legal in 82 minutes--not 82 YEARS (WTF?). This would encourage upstanding behavior, bring in more taxes, bring in more ideas that would give more people here and abroad a job to keep busy, and leave the law enforcers free to properly fight real enemies of the state, like banks.

Certain 'Murican types say that Those Damn Illegals don't follow the law and Took Er Jerbs. I remind them that no one follows the law and we should update the law to conform with basic respect, common sense, and our dire budget--and maybe our new Americans can give them their next job.