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but I feel exceptionally taken by Obama's bait and switch.

I don't. The bait and switch was telegraphed months before the election. If you voted for him anyway you don't really have anyone to blame but yourself.

I actually took a week off work and campaigned for him during the primaries. Adding insult to injury was the fact that Hillary (whom I helped him defeat) had the spine to vote against the FISA "compromise". My response to his victory was to apply for my pistol permit before Albany or Washington decides that I shouldn't be able to do so.

Try this one out Guard stops the interview of the Amtrak spokesman who says that photography at the station is okay: http://boingboing.net/2008/06/02/security-interrupts.html Until they fire and prosecute the security morons for these events they will continue with egg on their faces.

Exactly.

Never, ever, ever talk to a cop.

This was bollocks when you posted it on BoingBoing, and it's bollocks here.

Eh, trademarks, patents... all the same, right? *sheepish*

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/17/micky-mouse-vs-micke.html

If you are into ads, these are a trip. I vaguely remember the Honeywell ones, that's about it.

101 Classic Computer Ads

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/gimages/rule34portal.jpg There you go. Consensual love between a turret and a companion cube. Or confused love. Both are bound to be under age, though, considering their lives are so short. Wulfe

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/gimages/rule34portal.jpg You know. It depresses me on some level that I managed to find that within 5 seconds of starting to search. But it had to be done.

hehe... girl with a face of 10yo and melon sized boobs... try to figure out age. or even remote possibility that such person might have any relation to reality.

P.S. I think US should really adopt the proposal outlined here.

So let's see if I have this right.

Automakers lobbied for nice, drive-a-light-truck-through-this tax loophole legislation.

Automakers focus almost* solely on these light trucks because of their fat profits on them. This includes aggressive marketing to make suburban moms (who think off-roading is driving around back by the pool) think that these vehicles are perfect for them.

Shit goes down, oil gets expensive, the public wakes up and now nobody wants SUVs anymore, and automakers are looking at bankruptcy.

Why exactly is my tax money going to them when they got themselves in this mess in the first place?

*Ford has a leg up here because they have smaller, fuel-efficient lines for European markets that they are going to bring to the US markets. Diversity beats monoculture every time.

Why can't we just agree that taxes in general are a bad thing?

Because that just is not the case; it is an oversimplification. From the rest of your post I take it you live in the US. A lot of US-ians never take the time to see if their mantra of "This Is The Best Country In The World" is actually correct by comparing their own country to other countries. When you compare the US to other countries you will see:

• the US does not compare good when you look at how happy its inhabitants are.
• the US has the largest number of people doing life sentences because of something they did as a minor
• poverty rate is about 12.5% One in 8 people in the US live in poverty. That is bad for a developed nation, worse than Thailand for instance.
• more than 1% of the US population is in prison

Why am I bringing all of this up in a taxes related context? The end of Soviet Russia has proven that too much tax (everyone gets the same, in theory) did not work. There was not enough incentive. The total opposite, having as little tax as possible, which you sort of see in the US, is also not working correctly.

A lot of the countries that are higher on the happiness list (or lower on the crimes etc. lists) have way higher taxes than the US. This allows for instance the authorities here in NL to prevent or counter-act ghetto-forming by opening up 'buurthuizen' (neighborhood houses) in which people can follow courses etc. This leads to less crime and more people doing something useful in our society.

Is the government as productive with money as a private business? No. But there are things better left to government. Do I like paying tax? No. Would I rather pay less and live in a less pleasant environment? No. So I pay tax and I am glad for the system we have here in the Netherlands. But then again, our politicians seem to be a lot less corrupt ("campaign donations" here are frowned upon) and we have to reach consensus because we do not have a winner-takes-all system like in the US.

The bottom line: please look beyond your own country to see how taxes can add to the welfare of people paying those taxes. And then: please try and change your political system in a way that taxes are put to better use. Sorry if I seem to be patronizing, but I rather see the US turn into something good that something worse; and that makes me care.

With all the stories over various entities trying to screw everyone over fair-use, such as the one over a state claiming copyright over their written laws,, this is a nice change. What I like about creative commons is that it is one way for a content holder to hold on to their 'rights', yet allow the material to be used by the general public. This saves our culture being lost in the cellars of town hall or of those of some other 'IP owner'.

You mean something like this?

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/07/16/nintendo-motionplus.html

He's also a hypocritical little shit; we never did see him press charges against the SFWA for filing illegal DMCA notices, now did we?

He never did say he was going to press charges.

Funny how he didn't get all up in their grill, but he's happy to incite riots among his BoingBoing readers when it doesn't involve him?

Where did he incite a riot? Besides, if you read the comments associated with that same story, you'll notice that those same readers pointed out -- that the take down request wasn't even a real DMCA request and that the scribdb guys were just idiots for responding to that email (or to the followup email claiming that it was a DMCA request) the way they did.

It's absolutely fascinating that both he and his wife have managed to attain positions in academia despite having no fucking education. Seriously- she's a WoW player/Quake gamer, and USC calls her a "fellow"?

In most fields, a fellowship is just a scholarship. It doesn't mean much. It means someone/some organization is willing to fund your work. That's about it. Out of the 13 others they have listed as current 2007-2008 fellows, three don't seem to have College degrees at all (at least not listed), and only one seems to have just a Bachelor degree. Also, I would think she qualified for the fellowship because of the work she did for the BBC, not because of the last bit listed in her bio. At least, that seems like the common thread between all those non-degreed fellows, they all seem to have done some work for some media company.

He's also a hypocritical little shit; we never did see him press charges against the SFWA for filing illegal DMCA notices, now did we?

He never did say he was going to press charges.

Funny how he didn't get all up in their grill, but he's happy to incite riots among his BoingBoing readers when it doesn't involve him?

Where did he incite a riot? Besides, if you read the comments associated with that same story, you'll notice that those same readers pointed out -- that the take down request wasn't even a real DMCA request and that the scribdb guys were just idiots for responding to that email (or to the followup email claiming that it was a DMCA request) the way they did.

It's absolutely fascinating that both he and his wife have managed to attain positions in academia despite having no fucking education. Seriously- she's a WoW player/Quake gamer, and USC calls her a "fellow"?

In most fields, a fellowship is just a scholarship. It doesn't mean much. It means someone/some organization is willing to fund your work. That's about it. Out of the 13 others they have listed as current 2007-2008 fellows, three don't seem to have College degrees at all (at least not listed), and only one seems to have just a Bachelor degree. Also, I would think she qualified for the fellowship because of the work she did for the BBC, not because of the last bit listed in her bio. At least, that seems like the common thread between all those non-degreed fellows, they all seem to have done some work for some media company.

Simply stopping the infringement at this point might be enough to resolve the matter

And what if there *isn't* any actual infringement?

What if (oh, I don't know) someone spoofed the IP address to direct attention away from themselves?

Cavis didn't actually say that he found Limewire, or any warez on the affected IP address (or even if it was in use at the time of the alleged infringement.) Maybe the first step might be to determine if the letter is accurate before "disciplining" anyone?

That's exactly what Steve Jobs said about the Segway before it came out.

Because there's a huge difference between authorized government agents looking for criminal activities and regular employees looking through clients' records as mere entertainment.

Like when they listened to troops in Iraq calling their wives for phone sex?

Well, water bears anyway...

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/08/water-bears-survive.html

Yeah, well the manufacturers of that shirt might sue you if your picture is taken wearing 'their' shirt. It happens with cars.

Ummm.... Did you actually SEE the Couric interview? The bailout is all about healthcare? WTF? You KNOW they had to have been coaching the HELL out of her and she couldn't even name a newspaper? Damn,that is just.....damn. You should look up John Cleese on Sarah Palin on Youtube,because I think he really nailed it. Oh,here it is,I guess my Google Fu isn't completely gone after all. Finally let us not forget we are talking about her actually running as the PUSA. I mean honestly,do YOU think she is qualified for the job?

Sadly, at least one guy was probably fooled by the Paranormal State ad campaign. Now he's chatting daily with people who wear Hot Topic tees with the same fervor that Christian teens used to have for WWJD bracelets and wondering if these people understand the way the world really works.

In Berlin, Germany during the cold war era, the Stasi (Big Brother Police) knew this! They could track individuals with smell. In fact they have a room FILLED with little jars of every citizens' personal smell! I've been there and seen the rooms. They had special dogs trained for this too. They would open the jar and let the dog smell some... then go out into the city and find this person, they had a good success rate too which is kind of surprising. They would even track people by spraying different pheromones on their target.

Agreed and this is my primary reason moving to the Mac. How well a GUI is laid out and how well it looks is a BIG deal to me. Believe it or not, it really helps me to keep moving on an otherwise very boring project.

As long as these GUIs do not help in the creation of WMDs.

As far as I know, it's been done, but you're right, a "halo" of bright, strobing, IR LEDs would obscure your face on CCD cameras without IR filters (and they don't usually put them on, because of the reduction in light collection).

The comments here would seem to suggest that it's not going to work for all cameras though.

Nokia did a a "Ogg is proprietary, fuck you free software community" stunt a while back:

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/09/nokia-to-w3c-ogg-is.html
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/09/2045200

They just wanted DRM.

Not if her nemesis, the Floating Head of Vladimir Putin, has anything to say about it. It's Alaska!

non compete employment agreement are not viewed very favorably in California.

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/08/08/california-supreme-c-1.html

http://www.workforce.com/section/03/feature/25/82/12/index.html

http://www.employlaw.com/noncompete.htm

Yep,xkcd nailed it. And how pathetic is it when it is getting to the point that there really isn't a way you can buy a game and NOT be a pirate? You can go to Youtube and find video after video of people showing their brand new store bought games that refuse to run on their computers unless you crack the game. Now how many of those that go through that over and over again are just going to say screw this and just head straight to the torrents?

I remember when all we had to do was have the CD in the drive. A bit of a PITA,but it worked. Now the DRM has gotten so nasty that I've found that in some cases it causes the machine to behave worse than one with a virus infection. And considering how expensive PC games are I can see why a lot of folks are getting pissed. I'm just glad I've got a lot of older used games that I can play while I wait and hope this crap blows over. Because ATM the DRM is just too nasty for me to risk my stable gaming PC by allowing the new DRM anywhere near it.

maybe they were importing 10,000 Casio watches and 10 kilotons of fertilizer?

NC votes flip to Obama
Votes switched from Bush to Kerry

Sorry to disappoint you.

These are just errors. It goes both ways.

I didn't say I was comfortable with Diebold's CEO saying what he did...but he didn't say he would "do anything to help the Republicans" (your obvious implication being he'd do anything, including rig his company's voting machines...even though it would take likely literally hundreds of people in the process to actually pull off what many people think happened in a coordinated fashion). What he said in a fundraising letter in his capacity as a Republican business leader in Ohio was, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."

And even though Diebold had paper trail systems as options for many of their products, they often weren't purchased by municipalities because they weren't required by law.

And I didn't say e-voting was superior. I said that it was thought to be superior by those in Congress (many Democrats, including those who sponsored the legislation which resulted in the increases in electronic voting machines, ostensibly to make the process modern and fair). The major oversight was And if you read my post, I agreed that paper voting is the way to go, if only for a reason of maintaining confidence in the process. That alone would be worthwhile.

You can't even pretend to be informed about e-voting, at all, if you had never even seen a case of votes being "switched" to anything but Republican, when there are plenty of examples of both ways. It's just that the bloggers and activists who think it's all a vast right-wing conspiracy to steal elections are a lot louder.

I'm definitely looking forward to your reply.

Use a Ferrite bead.

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/08/02/kill-gsm-radio-buzz.html

USMC lawyers who've resigned in protest (from the prosecution teams) in Gitmo have been smeared. At this stage, pretty much everyone's a terrorist. UK PM Gordon Brown just used anti-terror legislation against Iceland, ferchrisake...

The issue isn't reliability only, it's reliability plus numbers. Transmission loss is a very real issue that will limit the ability to transfer wind power from windy areas to non-windy areas, and as the article points out directly, not every area is ideal.

The NEI (www.nei.org), granted a pro-nuclear body, estimates it'd take a wind farm the size of Wisconsin just to replace all of the (albeit not many) nuclear plants in the US. The US is expansive, but the footprint issue is very real, especially in the northeast, where land is pricey and scarce. Sure, they can be placed where people are not, but then again, transmission.

I'm very pro-diversication of energy, but providing 3.3twh of reliable electricity to the US, let alone the rest of the world, isn't going to happen without nuclear (or some other, new development).

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/10/05/confabulation-and-br.html Confabulation is the process, of creating and erasing our own fabricated memories, and we all do it; usually to make the memory more favorable to us. So called "eyewitness" testimony where people do the "can you show the court" the man who...? thing is wrong about half the time. The only solution is video cameras - EVERYWHERE.

Is it? How about kids being fingerprinted to enter Disneyland?

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/09/01/walt-disney-world-fi.html
http://disney.families.com/blog/disney-world-implementing-new-fingerprint-scanner-security

I'm actually surprised that it is that low.

What I particularly object to (in addition to the whole concept) is the capricious nature of many blocks. BoingBoing has been blocked by a number of blocklist companies, not because of anything rude or illegal, but because they had articles about filtering companies

At the end of the day, you have a human organisation making decisions, and even in the best of worlds that will be open to abuse.

As a brit, I welcome our Aussie friends to the panopticon of fear.

They already do, handing out stuff like this: http://www.boingboing.net/2006/03/13/copyright-comic-is-n.html

But uh, mind if I ask: exactly what kind of pictures are you planning on taking on your vacation? ;-)

Most keen photographers - myself included - have a story or two about being hassled by security guards or police for photographing public buildings. Check out this article for examples. It's for security reasons, you see. I might be planning a terrorist attack.

You wouldn't want the TSA goons to decide that your photographs seem odd and to give you a full-body cavity search "just in case".

Encouraged by their success in Japan, Nintendo turned it's eye to America. Rather then try to sell in a market they were not familiar with, Nintendo attempted to negotiate a distribution deal with Atari. The Famicom was to be released under the name "Nintendo Enhanced Video System." However, the deal fell through. Later plans to release the console under the name "Nintendo Advanced Video System" never materialized. The Nintendo Advanced Video System was to include a keyboard, a cassette recorder, a joystick, and a BASIC cartridge.

Meh. I'm never going to find the original Nintendo Power article, but this is good enough.

Now that's a name that'll be remembered

"Is there a correlation between gaming and driving ability?"

Yes... As referenced here.

He's managed to do it without crashing and killing the entire busload of passengers so far, so pr0ps to his mad skillzZzzz, though I do hope he realizes that there's no respawning when (and not if) he does. (Would you offer him a cheaper rate for car insurance?)

(Disclaimer: I do not condone driving and driving. In fact, I think the said driver is irresponsible and insane.)

requiring a physical ID for internet accounts is a bad idea.

i like the reCAPTCHA approach. if spammers want to abuse a reCAPTCHA system, at least they'll be making a positive contribution to society by helping to digitize printed literature. maybe Project Gutenberg or the Google Books Library Project can launch a reCAPTCHA service to put those botnets to good use. if you can't stop them, at least this helps to recover some utility from the problem.

there's also the issue of CAPTCHA porn and the related phenomena of outsourcing CAPTCHA solutions. as long as there are people willing to solve CAPTCHAs for porn, or money to feed their families, then no reverse turing test will ever be foolproof. so the best thing to do is to exploit this CAPTCHA-solving machinery.

why not make CAPTCHAs educational? instead of random words or random excerpts from books, make them arithmetic word problems, geometry proofs, SAT analogy questions, stoichiometry equations, spelling quizzes, etc. this way, the CAPTCHA solvers gain an education from their labors instead of just some cheap porn or a couple of bucks a day. and after solving CAPTCHAs for a few years, they'll be educated enough to land a real job and/or afford to pay for better porn.

this way you turn the spam problem into a way of educating horny teenagers and underprivileged poor in 3rd world countries.

Would you happen to have a link to one of these sites?

This is hardly the first time this has ever happened.

Why is this on slashdot?

Heck there are even better stories of this, such as a woman who used the laptop's webcam to !

requiring a physical ID for internet accounts is a bad idea.

i like the reCAPTCHA approach. if spammers want to abuse a reCAPTCHA system, at least they'll be making a positive contribution to society by helping to digitize printed literature. maybe Project Gutenberg or the Google Books Library Project can launch a reCAPTCHA service to put those botnets to good use. if you can't stop them, at least this helps to recover some utility from the problem.

there's also the issue of CAPTCHA porn and the related phenomena of outsourcing CAPTCHA solutions. as long as there are people willing to solve CAPTCHAs for porn, or money to feed their families, then no reverse turing test will ever be foolproof. so the best thing to do is to exploit this CAPTCHA-solving machinery.

why not make CAPTCHAs educational? instead of random words or random excerpts from books, make them arithmetic word problems, geometry proofs, SAT analogy questions, stoichiometry equations, spelling quizzes, etc. this way, the CAPTCHA solvers gain an education from their labors instead of just some cheap porn or a couple of bucks a day. and after solving CAPTCHAs for a few years, they'll be educated enough to land a real job and/or afford to pay for better porn.

this way you turn the spam problem into a way of educating horny teenagers and underprivileged poor in 3rd world countries.

Always keep your mouth shut and talk to a lawyer first.

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/28/law-prof-and-cop-agr.html

Direct video links:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4097602514885833865
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6014022229458915912&ei=z0PiSIiyLomuiALBpMSfCw

Itunes? How about Google or Walmart? When they deactivate their services, and make my rather-expensive music suddenly stop working, I think I have a right to act peeved about it.

Funny that you mention that... Wal*Mart is going to deactivate their DRM servers. People who bought music from them have about a month now to jump through some hoops, or lose it all.

I have mod-points, but I'll be kind and respond instead. Compare the user IDs of the two posts. He was trying to give an explanation to brain-dead moderators. He didn't communicate this very well, but your over-your-head style response was entirely inaccurate. It was an easy mistake to make.

Yeah, about that.

Is that not what meta-moderation is for?

Is it not like a joke, that when you have to explain it, or point out that it was a joke, there is no more joke?

Dude, the OP even bothered to enclose their comments in sarcasm tags.

When we start having to add comments to protect comments from moderators, we really have jumped the shark-infested cupcakes.

And, yes, I will be modded down as off topic. So what? Deal with it.

The last thing we need is a flurry of posts and mods aimed at protecting posts from the overly zealous and the large-integered.

Buh.

The best comparison is like 2 people having a PC, and one borrows the game from the friend. No sale is necessarily made, and no copy is truly "distributed".... However, when it comes to software, there is only one copy. After that is made copies onto other things, technically there is nothing more to be stolen.

A couple of questions for ya:
1) When friend 2 borrows from friend 1, what is he borrowing?
2) After friend 2 borrows from friend 1, can friend 1 still play his game? Why or why not?
I don't think that you've though this "only one copy" thing through very well. More questions:
3) What exactly is in those boxes on the shelves of video game stores?
4) If your answer included the word "CD" or "DVD", then where do CD's or DVD's come from?
Along those lines, it's perfectly okay to steal a battleship. After all, all the data required to reproduce it is on a computer somewhere... all they need to do "burn the battleship to a DVD", right?

Putting hyperbole aside for a moment...
There's little doubt in my mind that most of the AAAA titles make back far more than their R+D and production costs through sales. And no, "stealing" software is generally not equivalent to stealing another good, as the costs to generate another copy of the software are almost always marginal. The internet is a copy machine. See here for someone who doesn't understand that:
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/20/bill-oreilly-on-sara.html

"Pirating" is always a sticky topic. "Common sense" says that ethical people will only "pirate" for as long as they have little to no interest in or ability to purchase the software. It's the unethical bastards out there who are ruining it for us. ;)
And, naturally, if you have someone out there who's *selling* "pirated" copies, it's really easy to argue that each copy sold is a lost sale, as folks are now paying money for the software!

Was it any better than this?