So many memories of those early /. days have come flooding back.

RIP Roblimo.

Happy Birthday /.

It is difficult to fathom that the site has been around for 20 years, because I've "only" been online for 25 or so and I can't possibly be that old. Right? Right??

The electric company subscription service provides the voltage and amperage I need (all the time) when I need it (right now.) Without it, life would be very difficsy8907^#!Z NO CARRIER

I view streaming content on a variety of devices off of a perfectly acceptable cable internet connection and I still see the compression, but the worst of it is seen on the "main" family TV. Netflix offers the best experience (followed by Amazon Video, followed by the truly horrific Google Play), but it's still there.

I fully admit that I am not a hardcore video guy and not obsessed with tweaking a bunch of TV settings so there is indeed room to make adjustments. That said, I'm very happy with up-scaled DVDs of the same movies on the same TV. Adjusting contrast/brightness would only force the shadows even deeper for disk-based video and that's not an acceptable trade-off.

I should clarify my previous statement above. When I wrote "Visible gradients ruin every single scene always" I didn't meant to imply I'm seeing gradients all the time. I'm only seeing them in scenes containing large percentages of darkness/black.

Call it anything you want: "Netflix uses bagels to compress video" I don't really care. I just wish they would take a closer look at the darkest parts of a scene and stop compressing the hell out of it. Visible gradients ruin every single scene always.

I too read this when I was young, as a part of a science fiction anthology book we had in school. It is the one story from that time that has always stuck with me. The over-shadowing sense of futility and loss in the story really triggered something in my brain.

2005 wasn't that long ago, was it?

http://it.slashdot.org/story/0...

I tried:

Better, possession of un-taxed National Fostering Association items.

Especially if anything is select fire and made after '86 since the only non-mil and non-low earth orbit that can possess such are Friend for Life holders with the Society of Toxicologists to deal in National Flute Association stuff....

Nope - you didn't mention time horizon in your article. Top tip - describing finite things as infinite is bad style.

What seem to have wanted to say is

1) that the number of bugs in a non-trivial piece of software is sufficiently large that they will probably not all be found before the software is obsolete. Which is dull but probably mostly true (given the wriggle room in "non-trivial" and "probably")

2) that offering a bug bounty because of this large latent pool of bugs is pointless.

This second one is just not valid because

1) bug bounties encourage reporting of bugs
2) not all bugs are equal - there are different costs for finding them in a particular product and a bug bounty will encourage people to find and report the easier ones.
3) There are finitely many black-hats. As the easy-to-find bugs in the pool are exhausted then the cost per bug to the black-hat increases in this product.

At this point the black hat has a choice - pursue finding harder bugs in product A (which has a bounty) or go for the easy to find bugs in product B (which doesn't). Blackhats are running a business - they will go for the return on investment in product B.

This neglects the very large positive advantages of reporting which others have covered earlier (discovery of systematic issues, healthy ecosystem of investigators, disincentive to black-hats).

At this point your "bug bounties are useless" falls apart because it neglects the fact that black-hats are running a business - spending $10million to find a bug in Apache will not happen because the blackhats cannot get a return on their investment. They will spend $10k looking for exploits in Flash, or PDF, or other low hanging fruit.

You're right - I can only offer my unreserved apologies to the cockroaches.

If only you'd used there again, then you would have had two theres in your post.

That's true - the Spanish speakers.

And your dictionary compilers:

America

1 either continent (North America or S. America) of the western hemisphere
2 or the Americas the lands of the western hemisphere including North, Central, & S. America & the W. Indies
3 United States of America

from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/america

Why would you need vacuum tubes? You're in deep space surrounded by it - no need to keep it in tubes any more.

Some commentators are OK, some are dire for the sports. The nadir, the very worst, is Mark Lawrenson (football, or soccer for the former colonists) - just unspeakably bad and has never said anything of note or interest during any football game (he does more than the Olympics, so his uselessness is of vast scope).

The one I really don't get is the commentary opening and closing ceremonies. Why on earth do they think the artistic part of the ceremony needs commentary at all? Some idiot warbling "Here's Kenneth Branaugh giving Caliban's speech from the tempest" over Caliban's speech from The Tempest. Why? Do they feel the need to interject things like "Oh course, Jason Bourne is played by Matt Damon, whose first film role was in Mystic Pizza" during a tense chase sequence in the film?

I can just about (if I were being charitable) see the point of a bit of background for the more ceremonial parts of the event - flag carriers and that sort of thing. But even there - the crowd in the stadium get by perfectly well on the stadium announcers, so just be quiet.

And breathe

In the UK there are a few ways of getting the broadcasts: OTA (aka Freeview), Sky (commercial Sat), FreeSat, Cable, and internet streaming. We've got Freesat, and there were 25 additional HD channels (taking the number of Olympic HD channels up to about 27). All free. It was an embarrassment of riches. Bit of a gap in the fencing - lets to to live weightlifting, via the beach volleyball.

For example the opening ceremony you could have
1) Normal with commentary
2) Without commentary
3) Captioned commentary for the deaf

You simply could not pay for this anywhere else in the world.