Patreon is a tip jar, not a replacement for a living wage. Sounds like maybe people are misinformed. Ah well, maybe not everyone can make a living through online media. Big surprise there...

Yes, and we all know how well it works when governments over-regulate rather than being smart about it. People will just ignore the law and continue to fly anyway.

How about something that is totally client-side and does nothing but obscure ads? Load 'em up, use my bandwidth, whatever. Just hide them so they don't annoy me. Would make the blocker technology impossible to detect.

How to make advertising I won't block:

It can't have any movement (graphics, video, the frames, etc), it can't make any sound, it can't appear over, or obscure any content, it can't obscure or interfere with page navigation, and it can't take over 15% of my total screen real-estate regardless of device.

I won't block ads that conform to these rules.

Sprout a brain. The US "warns" the world about China, Russia, Iran, and pretty much EVERY nation who dares to try to achieve anything unless they're a member of the "Five Eyes." The US is so fucking paranoid it is disgusting, and every single excuse that there is to post a "warning" about the achievements of other nations, Slashdot's "editors" do so.

I don't worry about China's space efforts. I worry about those of the U.S. Which nation has invaded countries and been at war for the vast majority of it's history?

Such a search only "works" in the minds of a few people because they have a navel-gazing mindset that presumes all data is managed by a select group of companies they know about, and which are hosted by one country (usually the US in these narrow-minded viewpoints.)

In reality there are hundreds of thousands of service providers around the world, and you'd have to scan them all. Even Google mail is a drop in the bucket compared to the oceans of emails floating around the world.

No, this is in the US. It is fueled by one thing and one thing only: GREED.

As with all synthetic cannabis, side-effects may include death... :(

<quote>Blackberries are still being made? Rather, are they still being sold?? I thought that they had a historical hold on corporate world -- and I thought that even that was pretty much gone</quote>

Yep, they used to have a stranglehold on the corporate world, mostly because the executives always had Blackberries (and absolutely loved them) and IT refused to support anything else.

Then the execs all got iOS devices and ditched their blackberries and told IT to support iOS devices (or look for a new job). Now iOS holds a huge part of the corporate world that Blackberry will never get back. That market is gone from Blackberry, forever - they just don't have it in them to make a superior device.

Saw exactly this thing happen at my office. Once the big cheeses got iPhones, it was game over for Blackberry. And having a BYOD policy/project so the company didn't need to buy people phones was great from a budget standpoint.

You are absolutely, 100% correct. It was painfully obvious watching the behind the scenes footage that Lucas had been surrounded by a platoon of "Yes Men", rather than people who would give him honest feedback.

And here's the thing, I think that Lucas did have some really great ideas, but he also had some terrible ones. And without the filter to remove the terrible ones, you got a mashed-up mess.

Oh? What terminology did I get pedantic about? :P

But, hey, there is always some smart ass too cowardly to sign in to an account but willing to put in their $0.00 cents worth... :P

The number of pedantists who have nothing better to do than nit-pick about terminology without actually contributing anything useful to Slashdot just blows my mind.

The question is not whether we'll ever be able to "upload" a map of a neocortex, but rather whether we'll be able to transfer the will and sense of self that makes us who we are.

Perhaps at the time technology is able to upload a map, we'll discover that we really are nothing but meat machines. But I believe there is an extra "something" in the specific timings of how your particular neurons fire and interact with each other that makes you you. Not really a soul, per se, but a "something" bound in the chemistry and biology that we haven't even begun to measure or analyse. An essential "spark", shall we say.