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http://piratbyran.blogspot.com/ - Has an official pressrelease from the guys behind the pirate bay, the pressrelease is in swedish, if you want to read my english translation, then go to http://piratbyran-in-eng.blogspot.com/ I am sorry if this comment is wrong in some way, my first time posting here on Slshdt. Thanks!

Plagiarism is relatively commonplace in journalism. It's a masochistic profession with tight deadlines, and staff writers are more than likely to just copy and paste an AP news wire, change a few words here and there, cite the article, and submit it. The first thing my boss told me about dealing with reporters is that they're fundamentally lazy individuals, and if you give them a leading, poetic way to phrase something (say, about your product), as long as it doesn't sound blatently like a slogan, they'll write it down and use it word for word as if they'd said it themselves.

Otherwise, they'd have to digest the material, think about it, understand it, and regurgitate it. And believe me, wordsmithing takes time. Generally speaking if I have an article to post on Tuesday I'll write it Friday, rewrite it Monday, and look at it again in the morning on Tuesday. This is a luxury jounalists don't really have.

Of course, I'm not saying that all journalists are lazy people willing to appropriate anything so they can go home early. My favorite author used to be a journalist, if I recall, and he has an absolutely enviable command of English. But enough of them are. I'd wager that amongst themselves they're more than likely to look the other way because they're all in the same grind. Blog plagiarism is kind of a culture shock for them, because they've been ripping off people from papers on the other coast for years, and now these geeks are getting all bothered over a few filched words here and there.

See http://ranex.blogspot.com/2006/05/stuck-at-apple.h tml

"They finaly had to call the NYPD to get my comrades out of the elevator, by the time the NYPD go there they started to leak the hydralic lines to lower the elevator to the lower floor, and the wonderfull NYPD was rushing down the stairs with equipment to pry the door open, when the elevator got even with the lower floor the doors started to open and the police fully opened and held them open. The elevator was still going down to the basement floor, they the last person got out it was a good 2 foot step up. and two people burned there hands badly enough for them to blister on the hot lights in the shaft."

Check out the commentary (with more pictures, and some personal touches) at http://ranex.blogspot.com/2006/05/stuck-at-apple.h tml -- the blogger in question was not stuck inside the elevator, but his friends were. See the amazing elevator dancing. Hear the story of the miraculous water bottle drop.

The Pirate Bureau have set up a temporary news blog to inform the public about this whole incident: http://piratbyran.blogspot.com/

Shutting down The Pirate Bay can be compared to shutting down Google, by Swedish laws. Both sites supply a search engine with which you can find legal and illegal material on the internet. TPB will prevail.

Caroline Benner is a fellow at the University of Washingtons Institute for International Policy. From 2001 to 2003, Ms. Benner was a consultant with the geopolitical policy and strategy group at Microsoft.

Just what does a software company need a Geopolitical Policy and Strategy Group for anyway? Gobal FUD? Creepy, and she's got a long history of M$ apologies and FUD to her name. Let's review,

• Not embarrassed by M$ virus penetration of Pentagon systems or disruption of NASA communications endagering the Space Shuttle and five months before the 9/11 attacks she tells us not to worry about cyber terrorists because the mighty M$ can deal with such unskilled attackers through patches., " time and access one needs to create a devastating attack, like crashing an airplane. In "Six Nightmares," Lake doesn't consider the checks that protect infrastructure from such threats. He also fails to ask an obvious question: If there are so many malicious hackers at work (19 million, by Lake's count), why have their attacks been, by and large, fairly innocuous?" M$ forsight. Let's review what happened next:
  • 9/11 demonstrated to the world that there were indeed many well organized terrorists wanting to harm US citizens and how venerable rescue efforts were to disruption of communications.
  • US Government drafts defense plan
  • Chinese attack plans are revealed by the CIA
  • Still M$ languishes and languishes working on DRM and other lock out crap.
  • M$ incompetence contributes to the biggest US blackout ever by disrupting critical company communications and overloading network. The whole thing could have been prevented.
  • North Korea launches cracker schools.
  • The US Air force Mission is updated to include net dominance
  • US Government turns to superior Free Software
  • Home and business users lag, causing havoc in hospitals, threatening medical and accounting records and creating a hotbed of exploitable computers for spam and spam and spam and denial of service attacks used against EVERYONE.
• 2004 apologies, security is too hard! Duhhhhh, if M$ is not up to task no one is, right? Wrong.
• The FUD rolls on to this day check out Her new Blog! as she spews forth Pressing Questions.
  • Get the facts about how expensive and non free software is helping India and other developing coun

I'd be very skeptical this program given the history Airbus aircraft have had with their control systems and their general managerial attitudes for safety.

For instance, the crash of Flight 587, an Airbus A300 in November 2001 was caused by a "delamination" of the vertical stabilizer's composite structure - moisture got in between the layers of composite material and caused them to pull apart. Subsequent inspections found other aircraft with signs of vertical stabilizer delamination. The Canadian Transportation Safety Board has recommended detailed checks of Airbus A3000 rudder assemblies because of the issue.

The problem is that manual inspections can't always reveal signs of delamination - it often requires ultrasound inspection - something Airbus has refused to support, and there has even been accusations that Airbus has tried to inappropriately lobby the NTSB against such a recommendation.

Airbus' overreliance on technology and dysfunctional managerial culture continues to put passengers at risk - and this new automated system ensures that the pilot has even less control than he or she did before. Trusting that system to do the right thing in a crisis is always a risky proposition - trusting a manufacturer with such a generally shoddy attitude towards safety makes it even riskier.

Basically, the commute and stress on his family ended up with him quitting the Google job, and using it for leverage to increase his position in the previous job that he held.

http://leunamiur.blogspot.com/

Actually, Microsoft developers, testers and others directly involved in creating the software do not want to write crap and are passionate about creating good solid code. I know this is probably a surprise to you, but they want to create cool, stable, useful applications, but they are often hobbled by internal process, marketing/shareholder pressures and incompetent management.

You should read MiniMicrosoft, it is full of real stories fron MS people about just this situation and they are as unhappy about it as you.

He has been relying on satellite connection by US.Didnt u know tht??? I am here

you could comeup with facts to support your statment that Pakistan is not a developing country rather whining for no reason.Can you? I am here

You can still submit them with this Lotusscript agent:

http://ianconnor.blogspot.com/2006/05/reporting-sp am-to-spamcop-from-lotus.html

When I go jogging, I carry around one of these puppies with me. Whenever I need a break, I just stop to change needles, give it a crank and I'm off. A whole block can listen to whatever I'm listening to and it's a great conversational piece as well. And go ahead - mod this flamebait.

Yea...

or like David Hasselhoff playing with a bluescreen. ;-)

http://clipbin.blogspot.com/2006/05/david-hasselho ff-hooked-on-feeling_25.html

Good suggestion! I would supplement it with the following as well:
1. Episodic Learner Model/An online Lisp tutorial
2. Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation
3. How to Design Programs
4. Practical Common Lisp
5a. The book - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
5b. The movies - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
6. Loving Lisp - the Savvy Programmer's Secret Weapon
7. Common Lisp the Language, 2nd Edition
8. On Lisp
9. common lisp: a web application tutorial for beginners
10. JavaScript: The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language
11. Free JavaScript Learning Center
12. JavaScript for Scared People
13. JavaScript Closures
14. Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

= 9J =

Yep...
Most of these gadgets feel like this elektronik-supersonik to me.

Funny! Worst music videos of all time.

http://www.clipbin.blogspot.com/

Have a good weekend everyone.

> I guess the set of possible relative positionning of particules(or basic elements) in the universe is infinite uncountable.

Not necessarily - Planck length may be a minimum unit of distance in the universe, making the set of possible states potentially not merely countable but (along with the other Planck units) finite.

I got my Nokia N80 last week, here you can see a sample screenshot I took of the BBC website using the phone's khtml browser. It's running at a fairly decent resolution, although it appears much smaller in real life as it's on a 2.1" screen.

I mentioned it indepth with more photos here and here.

Basically, it's a very good browser that renders web pages pretty much perfectly, and has functions like zoom in/out, full page preview scrolling, visual back/forward tabs (the N80 also has an inbuilt WAP browser, which by comparison is rubbish). I did notice it crashed a lot if you went to a web page over 1Mb in size (including images, flash, etc), but otherwise it's great.

If you're really motivated you could check out the end of http://galaxy4girl.blogspot.com/

Like Jessica Cutler, for example.

This blog post from an IP professor in the UK puts things in perspective: http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2006/05/software-pate nts-will-you-wont-you.html

In June 2005, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved the creation of an xxx top-level domain (TLD) for pornographic websites. This reverses their previous decision back in November 2000, when they decided against the creation of the xxx TLD. The Bush administration, responding to the recent decision by ICANN, is objecting to the creation of the new TLD. Meanwhile, many of the folks at Slashdot are objecting to Bush's objection to the xxx TLD.

While the Bush administration's decision is based more on opposition to pornography than on opposition to the xxx TLD, the arguments raised by Slashdot readers are rather problematic. The prevailing argument appears to be that the Bush administration should not interfere with the ICANN's decisions, and that an xxx TLD is a good idea because it could make it easier for parents and system-administrators to filter out pornographic content. The second part of this argument raises important free-speech concerns.

While the xxx domain is currently voluntary, could it eventually become mandatory? The government could require that pornographic content be hosted exclusively on xxx domains, the ICANN could change the rules for com, net and org domains to allow only non-pornographic content, and hosting providers could refuse to host pornographic websites not associated with an xxx domain. In short, there are many ways in which an xxx domain could be abused, all in the name of keeping smut away from impressionable eyes.

The xxx TLD could become a mechanism for the regulation of pornographic websites hosted on xxx domains. According to ZDNet, a "nonprofit organization called the International Foundation For Online Responsibility will be in charge of setting the rules for .xxx. It's intended to have a seven-person board of directors, including a child advocacy advocate, a free-expression aficionado and someone from the adult entertainment industry." What are the rules being set, and why do we need a "child advocacy advocate" to make decisions about adult-oriented domains? Would they require use of AVS (age-verification systems) by websites that use the xxx TLD?

According to an earlier statement by Stuart Lawley, whose company -- ICM Registry -- will administer the xxx TLD, "apart from child pornography, which is completely illegal, we're really not in the content-monitoring business". While this may seem reassuring, how will they decide what constitutes "child pornography"? Which country's definition of "child pornography" will they adopt? Shutting down child pornographers is the government's job, not the registrar's.

There's no good reason why pornographic content should be stuffed into the xxx TLD and isolated from the rest of the Internet's namespace. What is so terrible about pornography that it must be kept in its very own TLD? Who the hell knows. It's a silly decision grounded upon primitive moral codes.

I hope you don't mind if I actually respond to your lunacy, besides the fact you didn't respond to a single thing I said, but only extended your own attacks.

Certainly. You know, the best way to help prevent personal attacks is to use your own personal attacks. It's like an anti-missile missile missile system.

I remember around the same time how the phrase "white devil" was exploding among black muslims, and Muslims leaders opining about the world of destruction that white man was causing the black community, and the need for groups like the black panthers to violently rise up against the white man considered "protected by the first amendment".

Yes, which, of course, justifies calling muslims names, and especially blank panthers, because well you know... they're calling us names so we have to do it too otherwise our anti-missile missile missile system will be overpowered.

Wow, that's a nice quote, can you please link the source?

Why I'd love to. Here's me blogging about it Sadly, the news site it was on took it down. It's good to know that even sometimes Republicans realize that their speech is a bit over the top. Like when Vox Day questioned Bush's assertion that we can't deport 11 million immigrants, considering after all the Nazi's got rid of six million Jews in only 4 years. They edited the op-ed over at WorldNetDaily, but plenty of people commented on their enthusiasm for the cause.

Oh, but hey, look at this... I found another person commenting on your friend saying how great it was for Africans to become Americans through slavery.

As I recall, it was the first Republican President Lincoln that used his executive powers to end slavery. And it was Republicans who were 79% in favor of the Civil Rights act of 1964, and Democrats who opposed it by 63%. Oh, and lets not forget than when Democrats tried to filibuster the bill, it was the 81% of Republicans that could have unilaterally ended the filibuster.


Obviously this proves that Democrats are all racists! HA! LOL! Where do you get this shit? Is there some sort of secret "How to be a moonbat" manual? If so, I'd love to read it.

Hey, you know. Back in 1964 it was a Republican who authored the Civil Rights Act, true. But it only passed with the aid of Democrats like Hubert H. Humphrey, Mike Mansfield, Lyndon B. Johnson and not to mention John F. Kennedy. Obviously, according to you this proves the Democrats were all racists.

But which party did Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond and the other filibusterers switch to later on? And which Republican Presidential candidate campaigned against the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

Admittedly Goldwater did later in his life regret his involvement with that. But it's obvious from looking at the map which party opposed Civil Rights that year. The Republican party is no longer the party of Lincoln. It hasn't been since 1964. Abraham Lincoln today would be called a traitor to his country by the members of the modern GOP. :-(

You know for a fact why? Because Google issued a press release, or because the proprietor told you? Because we all know presumanbly political websites have no interest in exposure or fund raising.

Because he said so himself on his blog.

Anyway, feel free to call me a lunatic any time.

I am proud to say that I participated in today's FSF event.

I believe the combination of Digital Rights Management technology and the Trusted Computing initiative are the single greatest threat to a free software desktop. I believe the danger is not just that we will be pushed into a desktop ghetto where we will not be allowed to enjoy the newest movies and music.

RMS' Right to Read might seem far out for most folks I believe he is point on. DRM will tie media to an user or possibly an user and a specific machine. DRM will allow corporations to gather unprecedented amounts of information about us. If we are not vigilant we are headed into an Orwellian dystopia where all of our digital habits are carefully monitored and controlled.

The really interesting thing is that it WILL NOT STOP PIRACY! As long as we enjoy books and movies with our eyes and music with our ears there will be an analog hole and there will be piracy. DRM is not about stopping piracy it is about destroying competition. Competition from small developers, competition from start ups and competition from free software...

For almost the whole of human history culture has been shared. Imagine if Shakespeare had been controlled by DRM and copyright law so that no was able to sample his plays. What would modern literature be like. I imagine it would be worse. We stand at a moment in history where we have an unprecedented ability to create and share. Do we want to hand the keys of our shared culture to those least likely to allow us to use it in meaningful ways?

I agree with those who say the problem are the laws such as the DMCA and as well as perpetual copyright. These things should be overturned. However it is my opinion that a motivated group of individuals could raise awareness within the public to create a backlash and prevent a DRM nightmare from fully forming.

If I did not stand up at this moment in time and let the world know that DRM is wrong I would be complicit in the effort of corporations to steal our shared culture.

Do I believe that I can stop the DRM juggernaut of Microsoft/Apple/Intel/Etc? I don't know but I don't believe I can just let it happen.

One note on RMS, you may not agree with him but he serves an extremely important role in both the free software and open source movements. He is the logical extreme of freedom while others serve as the logical extreme of pragmatism. He helps define the spectrum of opinion on all issues related to software freedom and for that (and more) I appreciate him. If we did not have him and the FSF we would not be where we are today.

I will be posting about my experience at http://psfk.blogspot.com/ (nothing to see there just yet 5/23/2006 @ 6:20 PM )

Sorry to nitpick but Australia does not have "fair use". The system being adopted is legally quite different from the US "Fair Use" in that there will only be very specific exceptions made for time shifting and format shifting etc.

Check Weatherall's blog for detailed legal commentary.

http://weatherall.blogspot.com/

The fact that PHP and MySQL are the most deployed tools for web development is a rather sorry situation, given the deep shortcomings of both tools.

See these articles about the many PHP warts:

Experiences of Using PHP in Large Websites

Why PHP sucks

The PHP Ghetto

You will be happier with a more mature and complete dynamic language like Python, or even (gasp ;-) ) Ruby.

Similarly, see these other articles about the many MySQL warts:

MySQL Hate

MySQL Gotchas

Compare the last one with the one for PostgreSQL:

PostgreSQL Gotchas

Finally, an in-depth comparison between MySQL and PostgreSQL on Slashdot itself:

Comparing MySQL and PostgreSQL 2

Finally, recall that both MySQL's transactional backends are now controlled by Oracle:

Oracle Acquires Sleepycat

Avoid both PHP and MySQL as much as you can, I say. There's better stuff out there.

This guys blog http://morgellonswatch.blogspot.com/ is a cynic's look at Morgellons. He takes jabs at all of the "theories" behind the disease and is quite convincing. In an especially interesting article, he shows how Morgellons sufferers had their "hairs" looked at by professionals, and when they were shown to be nothing more than bits of household fabric, the Morgellons sufferers insisted that the lab had lied, and that they were out to get them. Highly recommended if one wants an alternative view on the condition.

I've written my thoughts on this and an analysis of the evidence from an ad executive's POV on my site The Halting Point(shameless plug), read it here.

I've written my thoughts on this and an analysis of the evidence from an ad executive's POV on my site The Halting Point(shameless plug), read it here.

While "real KP" may be a myth and is certainly rarer than one could get the impression of, there is indeed much "pedophile acticity" on the internet. Their highly organized and long-standing community includes message boards, blogs, link directories, podcasts, radio stations, and more.

"Miller-Urey only showed that the amion-acids could be produced by "accident". Of course, it proved this by going through a lot of hard work to make them."

Well no, not really. Until them, we didn't know that the basic amino acids will form under some fairly pedestrian chemical conditions. Miller and Urey DIDN'T sit down and build them: they instead set up an environmental condition and they came about by themselves. That's only a tiny piece of the picture in the field of abiogenesis, but it was most definately a fascinating surprise that changed the way we thought about organic molecules.

"What it dosen't accout for it the information."

This has become the latest creationist trope, but it's complete nonsense.

Define "information" any way you like, and evolution produces it. It's mathetically demonstrable, we do it all the time in practice when we use genetic algorithms, and we observe it in nature. Generating new information is a BASIC function of the evolutionary process (depending on how you define information, it's either random mutation ITSELF, or the outcome of natural selection). Heck, the article here describes it happening. It might not phrase it in the language of information, but when the demands of an environmental pressure is imprinted onto a gene pool, that's an information increase in the gene pool (information about the environment).

The claim that evolution cannot produce information is a garbled version of the arguments of William Dembski, whose arguments have been roundly debunked too many times to count.
http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/03/king-of-bad-m ath-dembskis-bad.html

"Once DNA would be formed out of the acids it has to code for orgenelles and cell walls and whatever else."

Well, eventually, but almost certainly not right away. You're imagining that early life would immediately need to become like life today. Almost certainly, that amount of complex cell structure was not there at the beginning. Single celled life ruled the world far longer than the multicelluar life and complex single-celled structures we have today.

"Even the scientists that support Evolution are having a hard time coming up with an explination with where the information came from, not just the medium it is carried on."

As I said, no. Information is trivial. What you are probably referring to is that we don't know how specifically early life arose, largely because we just don't have much to go on to direct us in one direction or another. But like most things in science, we're working on it, and fascinating discoveries and insights happen almost every other month.

It's not exactly a hoax - altought there are a few people who might be considered to be quacks, they really seem to believe in it. Here's the board the wackiest post on: http://lymebusters.proboards39.com/index.cgi?board =rash And here's a pretty comprehensive set of articles debunking the whole thing: http://morgellonswatch.blogspot.com/

Someone happend to plot the data in regards to Bushes "approval rating" in correlation to the increase in gas prices. This isn't the first time such an event happend. One only has to look back to the Carter administration when gas prices shot up. A more indepth explination is found here.

And if you thought the Republicans are losing ground, the Democrats in congress are in even worse shape. So will they take back the House? I seriously doubt it. One thing for sure though, I expect a major shake-up within the Republican party come election time.

Someone happend to plot the data in regards to Bushes "approval rating" in correlation to the increase in gas prices. This isn't the first time such an event happend. One only has to look back to the Carter administration when gas prices shot up. A more indepth explination is found here.

And if you thought the Republicans are losing ground, the Democrats in congress are in even worse shape. So will they take back the House? I seriously doubt it. One thing for sure though, I expect a major shake-up within the Republican party come election time.

Someone happend to plot the data in regards to Bushes "approval rating" in correlation to the increase in gas prices. This isn't the first time such an event happend. One only has to look back to the Carter administration when gas prices shot up. A more indepth explination is found here.

And if you thought the Republicans are losing ground, the Democrats in congress are in even worse shape. So will they take back the House? I seriously doubt it. One thing for sure though, I expect a major shake-up within the Republican party come election time.

Which is why the CIA hired him

They tried to kill each other!

While back in the 1950's the CIA supported the Ba'athists, it did not "hire" Saddam directly. He was part of the overthrow plot, yes, but he was not a hired hitman. Neither was he "installed". And there is plenty of evidence -- like Richard Clarke's "boogie to Baghdad" assessment -- that shows they were not enemies. The recently translated tapes & documents seized from Saddam's palaces add further proof. So watch the History channel. Read a book. Or read this or these or this. But whatever you do, get educated before spouting off nonsense like this again.

http://igdmlgd.blogspot.com/2005/10/um.html

His original blog entry specifies that he ordered the book from a 3rd party reseller, probably via Amazon Marketplace. Sure Amazon should take some responsibility for the resellers they partner with, but it certainly wasn't their direct fault that this book showed up late. If he really cared about getting back at the party who caused his delay he would try to attack the reseller, not try to go after Amazon.

I think he's just after the publicity however he can manage to get it.

Its amazing that people tear into smf like this. UNIX init is a simple system from times long past which is being extended and in some senses replaced by a (while more complex in some regards) more flexible system to represent the age we live in today.

One of the things the Windows NT world has correct is the way services run and are managed on a system. Service-like tasks should be supervised, not merely fired by scripts and ignored. Status information should be able to be gleaned by monitoring tasks through a standard API, etc etc. Services should be able to depend (specifically and declaratively, not merely through an arbitrary numeric ordering) on other services, services should be able to be restarted upon certain conditions. There really is nothing wrong with innovating and extending systems in such a fashion, as long as you don't break the old way of doing things or make the new way unusable. Sun have done a good job in preserving rc*.d compatibility in Solaris 10, as well as making the new system work well.

Also, attempting to forcefully disable a core part of an operating system and then complaining when it doesn't go as well as you'd hoped is daft too.

And as far as zones go, there's been plenty of testing and there are plenty of uses and reasons why zones are somewhat more secure and flexible than jails. What happens in a zone *does* stay in a zone. If you're root in a zone it doesn't mean you can affect the global package database or filesystem, just the ones within your zone. Look here for some contrasts between Jails, Chroot and Zones if you don't fully understand the concept (which it appears you don't): http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2005/06/zones-vs-jail.h tml

I'm not up for spreading FUD about Linux, but I wish people like you would stop spreading said FUD about Solaris too.

Why are YOU preaching to the CHOIR?

Most of the people here are smarter (at least in the tech sense) that those people that you are ranting about.
Not trying to plug my own blog cause it ain't that great, but it talks about what you were saying...worth checking out. http://jsuggs.blogspot.com/2006/05/others-computer -usage-baffles-me.html

As the article points out, Peter raised the money necessary to pay the reexamination fee through donations. I don't know what his chances are of being successful, but it certainly shows that blogs can be useful in allowing more people to participate in processes that were previously mainly used by businesses. Maybe they'll raise the reexamination fee to keep up with technical progress. ;-)

why do you talk as if the rovers are a thing from the past? They're both still functioning, sending pictures on a daily basis, see for example the latest great composite shots of Burns Cliff, generated out of separate pictures, on the fly on your own machine in the great browser: http://midnightmarsbrowser.blogspot.com/

And this is the genius of Sun's licensing of Java. Sun, being a fairly poor as a software house, managed to slow down every single one of their competitors that adopted their Java technology. Sun was able through this licensing to dictate the pace of innovation effectively slowing down everyone to a grinding halt.

More here: http://spellchecked.blogspot.com/2006/05/open-sour cing-of-java_17.html

http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2005/12/differe nt-argument-for-right-to-bear.html

I refer you to the excellent Evolution 101 podcast, transcripts of which can be found here. Select the transcripts that focus on molecular evidence. The molecular evidence is overwhelming that we have a common ancestor with chimps, and creatonist theory (if you can call it that) is falsified.

This isn't to say that nothing is unique about humans. Clearly we were somehow positioned to undergo rapid selection for certain traits that the chimp ancestor population didn't need. Reconstructing how that happened is reasearch program that will take generations, but gaps in knowledge about past events doesn't discredit the knowledge we do have, however much you may wish it otherwise.

That all life on Earth in its amazing diversity has a common ancestry in the inconceivable distant past is to me a much more awe inspiring thought than any myth of special creation. Scientists and other thoughtful people don't just reject creationism because it's demonstrably wrong - they also reject it because it's ugly.

Or the human cattle ID cards Act, which creates by far the world's most intrusive Big Brother database on citizens by linking up 5+ previously unconnected databases...

The Dictatorship Bill, also called the Abolition of Parliament Bill, Totalitarianism Bill or (by the Govt) the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill is nothing less than a naked grab for power. After being amended 3x, the Bill was passed in the form described here.

LRRB enables ministers to rewrite our constitution with only rudimentary scrutiny. Consider the extraordinary mass surveillance / coersion implications of the ID Cards Act. Even the well-organised opposition could not stop this legislation.

What chance then of:
1. Spotting obscure but deeply damaging clauses hidden in the boring legislation?
2. Motivating the Tories, LibDems and enough New Labour drones to subsequently block it?

LRRB is then carte blanche for Blair to do what he will with this country. What can we deduce of his plans?

New Labour already rejected an amendment to stop LRRB re-writing our most important constitutional laws. They then promised to introduce new amendments fulfilling the same thing. Our skepticism was once again justified. This is more than enough evidence that Blair wants dictatorial powers.

LRRB is obviously a precursor to passing laws which Parliament wouldn't otherwise pass.

Considering the deeply scary laws he's got through Parliament, the likelihood is that he wants something so badly, and so unpalatable that he won't even risk presenting it for proper Parliamentary scrutiny.

- He does not need Parliamentary approval to invade Iran
- He already has Hitler's Enabling Act.
- He has already passed RIPA and the ID Cards Act for more Big Brother snooping than anything China or North Korea have.
- He already has locked up people for 3 years without trial or even being questioned - although he has been twice been 'told off' for breaching the Human Rights Act in this way.

I did not believe that he needs LRRB to repeal the HRA - indeed one welcome amendment was to exclude the HRA from being amended. When every other explanation has been ruled out, whatever remains, however unlikely, must be considered. I think something much worse is coming although I dread to think what.

You should've made a link to it

Sorry buddy. You are DEAD wrong on this one. The only, and I mean ONLY places where ads MIGHT fit in, MAYBE is in games set in modern-day settings, and in places where one would expect to see ads. Which basically means Sports titles, and THAT IS ALL.

Frankly, I'm with the guy above you. I HAVE ALREADY PAID a pretty penny to play that game, and I'll be DAMNED If I'm going to allow my expensive Cable Modem Bandwidth be used so someone else can make a buck!

Don't even get me STARTED on the privacy issues involved here. What most people here fail to understand is that the companies are collecting personally identifiable information via the game that they can then use to sell and make more money, or spam you with more ads!

Think about it. Let's take a game like Planetside. Massive, the ad company, has placed thier putrescent ad engine into that game. The ad engine generates a unique SID based on hardware and software information on the PC. This SID accompanies any and all "viewing" information that is sent back to Massive regarding which ads you looked at and for how long. This info can be tied to your login to the game, which is tied to your billing information and your e-mail address.

Let's say you have a Fanta ad in the game (Planetside did actually have those for awhile) and you spend a large amount of time looking at those ads. Massive can work with SOE (the Planetside game company) and it's advertisers to then send you SPAM e-mail with Fanta offers and ads, or send them directly to your home or billing address!

This becomes a HUGE invasion of privacy, done on the backs of gamers, so some greedy corporations can make another buck pissing us all off with invasive and annoying ads. (Don't even get me started on what all those ads do to your framerates!)

You can read more about it at my blog, http://wearyman.blogspot.com/2005/08/privacy-lies- and-videogames.html

We gamers need to tell advertisers that we can't stand the ads, or there will only be more of them, and they will be more intrusive and obnoxious. And we will still have to pay top dollar for the games, just to be annoyed.

(No ads on my blog, BTW. I would never do that to /.ers.)

I've done a writeup on this very story topic on my site which you can read here at The Halting Point and you can read the original Slashdot post that I made that sparked my writing of that piece.

While I'd very much so appreciate the clicks, (even though I've made all of .07 through adsense!), to sum it up for those who don't want to make the jump....there are several levels of in-game advertising in terms of invasiveness. And you can view it as a spectrum. On the far left you have extremely uninvasive and even welcome additions such as sponsorship logos in Gran Turismo. It fits with the game world since the game world is simulating reality and they are expected in that type of game.

Then you have things like billboards in MMOs like Anarchy Online and City of Heroes that, while appropriate for the setting (a city with billboards), still annoy you a bit because its trying to transplant culture from one world (reality) into a made up world where those companies do not exist.

Then you have your extremely invasive product placement with crap like what Sprite pulled in the Matrix game, or what McDonalds pulled in The Sims Online. That is the stuff that pisses off gamers because it is a blatent slap in the face. It doesn't add ANYTHING to the game and in fact detracts from it...all that for $60.

The interesting thing is how advertisers are trying to work their way into some of the more dominant games where the majority of titles are fantasy based like WoW. In my story I wrote a bit about possible ideas for working product placement into those worlds, but it requires advertisers to be able to have the balls to poke some fun at themselves, which I doubt they'd ever do.

Honestly...in-game advertising is only going to get more abundant. Whether it becomes worse or not (ala the intraweb) depends on the so-called "gate-keepers" of the games who will have the final say over how much of a sell out they want their game to be.

I'd expect more corporate sponsored guilds and guild events, more added material (like the CS map Subway made), and other new things we haven't considered.

If it gets to the point though where the games are starting to majorly sacrifice playability and content for ad revenue though, customers will complain and run for the nearest competitor.