geekosystem

As of writing, 20 of India's 28 states have seen widespread power outages in the past two days, leaving as many as 700 million people without electricity. Even the nation's capital of New Delhi was affected. Indian officials have yet to determine a cause for the blackout, but assure the nation that engineers are working around the clock to rectify the problem.

With the culmination of the SOPA hearings conveniently postponed until sometime in January, the tech world gained a little bit of time to prepare and execute some anti-SOPA demonstrations. Wikipedia had been considering a protest blackout that, as of yet, has not come to fruition and, according to reports by CNET, other Internet giants including Google, Twitter, and Facebook may be considering the "nuclear option" as well. The reports are derived from a quote by Markham Erickson head of the NetCoalition trade association that calls the aforementioned companies members.  "There have been some serious discussions about that," Erickson says. "It has never happened before."

If you go to Wikipedia in the next couple of days and don't see anything, there probably isn't anything wrong with your Internet connection. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is considering blanking out all Wikipedia pages in protest of SOPA, a bill that countless Internet-based content providers and freedom of information advocates are particularly wary of. Wales pitched the idea to the Wikipedia community and feels that a blackout could send an extremely powerful message to law-makers.

Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks FlashForward deserved another season. Across the world, fans of the series staged a global blackout of their own (the good kind, not the solar storm apocalypse kind) in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Pisa, New York, Atlanta, Seattle, Toronto, Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles. Those California collapsers had the privelege to pass out in front of ABC studios itself in Burbank. What an honor. It seems unlikely, to put it lightly, that this is going to have any effect at all. Despite being global, it wasn't on that massive a scale. ABC execs are unlikely to stop and think, "Well, because those scattered few would watch the show if we brought it back, let's do it." That's not to say there isn't a big enough fan base to merit the show returning. They just didn't all participate in this weird global protest. Here's some expert cinematography documenting the blackout. Hell, these guys could just team up and remake the series themselves. Did someone say, "YouTube spin-off series"?