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Comment No Ads (Score 1) 421

I cut the cord years ago and pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime because there are no ads. I really, really hate ads.

Amazon Prime has been showing ads before some shows on the iPad, usually ads for more of their content. If I didn't use Amazon Prime for other benefits (e.g., reduced shipping costs), I would have dropped Amazon Prime already. I rarely view Amazon content on the iPad anymore because of this annoyance.

If/when Netflix starts showing ads, I will drop them, too.

Ads in the middle of a program or movie break the flow. If I am watching television and ads are present (in a hotel room recently), I end up muting the television and ignoring the ads. That's when I brush my teeth or check my email.

Did I mention that I really, really hate ads? Why would I pay to view ads?

Comment GoDaddy is exempt from SOPA (Score 1) 330

http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/12/sopa-hearing-will-never-end.php/

From the article:

Polis pointed out that SOPA and Smith's amendment already excluded certain operators of sub-domains, such as GoDaddy.com, from being subject to shutdowns under SOPA.

"If companies like GoDaddy.com are exempt, why aren't non-commercial domain servers exempt?" Polis asked.

Submission + - A New Class of Nuclear Reactors (freakonomics.com) 1

prunedude writes: From Freakonomics: The folks over at IV Insights, the blog associated with Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures, point out that it was the complete loss of power that disabled the cooling systems protecting the plant'(TM)s reactors. Which raises the question: Is there nuclear technology that could withstand such a catastrophe? Possibly. TerraPower, an Intellectual Ventures spin-off that also boasts Bill Gates as an investor, is working on a new reactor design called a traveling wave reactor that uses fast reactor technology, rather than the light water technology used at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
The two biggest advantages of the fast reactor design is that it requires no spent fuel pools and uses cooling systems that require no power to function, meaning the loss of power from the tsunami might not have crippled a fast reactor plant so severely.

Comment Re:Who needs to search tweeter? To find what? (Score 1) 108

From the techcrunch article:

Now that Google and Bing are getting the firehose, it could have a big impact on search results. For the search engines, the firehose is much more valuable than any single Tweet. They can index it and sift it, looking for patterns and spikes in keywords and shared links to get a better sense of what people across the Web are paying attention to at any given moment. This data can then be folded back into regular search results, even if the top result isn't a Tweet.

For example, if a link to a post about healthcare reform on an obscure blog suddenly gains currency and is retweeted hundreds of times, that is a signal to perhaps rank that link higher in searches about "healthcare reform." If people stop Tweeting about it, then maybe it goes down in the ranking. But Google and Bing can use the firehose as a rich source of signals to mine and then blend back into regular search results.

Networking

Why the Mediterranean Is the Net's Achilles' Heel 195

An anonymous reader writes "A spate of broken cables has brought disruption for many of the world's Web users in 2008 — and the Med has been at the center of the problems. For political reasons, the Mediterranean Sea is an Internet bottleneck through which the majority of traffic between Europe and Asia is squeezed. That traffic must run the gauntlet of earthquakes and heavy maritime traffic to reach its destination. Better and stronger cables are urgently needed to avoid a re-occurrence of the 2008 outages."
Supercomputing

Submission + - Supercomputer Made From Video Game Components

prunedude writes: The NY times is reporting that an American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L. To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.
Security

Submission + - Which Lost/Stolen Laptop Trackers Do You Like? 2

saudadelinux writes: "I got held up at gunpoint in July, and my laptop was stolen. Fortunately, I was able to get a new one, and I'm typing this post on it.
There companies out which for a fee, install tracker software on your laptop. If it's stolen or lost, they track its whereabouts whenever it gets on the 'Net and work with local law enforcement and ISPs to find the machine. I'm wondering: does anyone use one of those services? Does anyone have a recommendation for which company to go with? I'm using a dual-boot Ubuntu/XP machine, and the couple of companies I've looked at do Windows-only. Are there Linux options? TIA, saudadelinux"

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