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Their industry trade association, the ESA, still supports SOPA. So YES, all 3 companies are still supporting it "privately"
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/31/ea-sony-nintendo-pull-suppor.html

Hmm, I think I'm mixing threats here... Goram multitasking.
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/30/printer-malware-print-a-malic.html

Have you seen the box office numbers for this holiday season?
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/25/let-there-be-sequels.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/25/idUS261492126020111225

Mission Impossible 4, Sherlock Holmes 2 and Alvin and the Chipmunks 3 did well at the Christmas box office in the U.S., while Girl with a Dragon Tattoo and Tintin both bombed.

We are negatively reinforcing this behavior

AC is a doofus. Speaker cables do not need shielding. The idea is ludicrous.

AC probably also insists on running power through his cables before using them first to break them in, using $485 wooden stereo knobs, vertical turntables, and Monster Cables.

Why contrast between two unrelated things?

The USA arrested and jailed a man for directing obscene pornography between consenting parties.
Now I'm sure some would argue what he did was manipulative and destroyed the lives of several people and liken his abuse to rape. Well the USA also arrested and jailed a man for possessing obscene comics, where no adults or children were harmed in the making.

Let's discuss related facts shall we?

Tom The Dancing Bug

Geez, you really haven't been paying much attention, have you?

An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the U.S. Congress

Today, a group of 83 prominent Internet inventors and engineers sent an open letter to members of the United States Congress, stating their opposition to the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills that are under consideration in the House and Senate respectively.

Blacklisting Provisions Remain in Stop Online Piracy Act

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California) urged panelists to remove the DNS and firewall aspects of the bill.

Rep. Mel Watt (D-North Carolina) said he was not a technological “nerd,” but said he did not “believe” security experts who said that the internet would become less secure unless Issa’s amendment was adopted. “I’m not a person to argue about the technology of this,” Watt said before he voted against the amendment. Issa’s amendment failed 22-12.

Congressional SOPA hearings: no opponents of the bill allowed
Nov. 15

As the House of Representatives opens hearings on SOPA, the worst piece of Internet legislation in American history, it has rejected all submissions and testimony from public interest groups and others who oppose the bill.

        Irony Alert: The House is holding hearings on sweeping Internet censorship legislation this week -- and it's censoring the opposition! The bill is backed by Hollywood, Big Pharma, and the Chamber of Commerce, and all of them are going to get to testify at the hearing.

        But the bill's opponents -- tech companies, free speech and human rights activists, and hundreds of thousands of Internet users -- won't have a voice.

There is plenty of commentary by tech people out there on the detrimental effects to the internet by SOPA and PRO-IP. Just fucking google it.

they were trying to appeal to english speaking olympics visitors in 2008, and the translation server crashed, but they thought the error message was the translation, so we get:

http://boingboing.net/2008/07/15/chinese-restaurant-c.html

so would it be like divide by zero if machines try to map the real world and encounter a bit of the real world mimicking machine world fail?

What this. http://boingboing.net/2002/12/08/coffeemaking-pc-case.html boingboing

Reinstate Glass-Steagal act, repeal the Citizens United verdict and eliminate the Bush era tax cuts and veto NDAA and see if you still have over a million protesters. Some local groups will stick around, particularly the universities, but as a national movement, it'll be all but over.
I don't think it's unreasonable to link OWS and the Middle East. Protesters marched in Tahrir square on behalf of Oakland.
Disclosure: I live in Oakland and have spent a lot of time with Occupy Oakland and Occupy SF and I've camped at Occupy Oakland.

On that note: http://boingboing.net/2011/03/08/passport-ownership-p.html

Correlation, causation and all that but somewhat interesting.

The main thing to think about is that if one consider the surface area of USA, a person living there can travel from winter to summer and back again without ever showing a passport, encountering someone not speaking english, or accepting payment in dollars.

iFart, fart phone, Pull My Finger, Pro Edition, and many more.

'Nuff said?

Asking people to pay for what they use doesn't seem like *that* radical a concept to me.
Why is Internet use seen differently?

Maybe because bandwidth hogs are not the primary cause of congestion.

Figure out what the top 10% of users use, draw a line there and say it's an extra $5 each month you surpass it.

Except, it turns out that the "problem" is not bandwidth hogs.

The person responsible for these legal threats is one Marc Stephens, who is not a lawyer. There is an excellent article on Boing Boing detailing Mr. Stephens' baseless threats.

I was looking for the "logistics" details. They're proposing a mixed-use application. Residences require furniture and other durable goods, and the meatbag residents require a number of consumable goods. While building through the water table presents an interesting engienering challenge, the long-term support logistics are even more challenging. Are they expecting to bring all peopl and materials in through the subway system? There had better be several maintenance and service decks similar to the utilidor structures found under Disney World. Materials transportation within the structure will require serious thought too. I would expect there to be a warehouse and loading dock transfer station on the surface somewhere, you know, convenient for the trucks. Every building I've ever seen has a service entrance.

Whoa whoa whoa careful there! You're not supposed to know, notice, or comment. Head down, mouth shut, there's a good little citizen. Or else.

Boing Boing show a split screen of multiple views at the same time.

Trick, cajole, threaten, inconvenience, stress, discomfit, and a whole host of other verbs that come just shy of it, but not quite outright torture yet.

From the videos of what the US police have done this week I wouldn't be so sure.

http://boingboing.net/2011/11/18/police-pepper-spraying-arrest.html for instance.

(I would call pepper spraying someone so much they're coughing up blood 45 minutes later torture, but maybe Americans call it 'discomfort'.)

No, we call that what happens to stupid hippies.

Trick, cajole, threaten, inconvenience, stress, discomfit, and a whole host of other verbs that come just shy of it, but not quite outright torture yet.

From the videos of what the US police have done this week I wouldn't be so sure.

http://boingboing.net/2011/11/18/police-pepper-spraying-arrest.html for instance.

(I would call pepper spraying someone so much they're coughing up blood 45 minutes later torture, but maybe Americans call it 'discomfort'.)

>>Red is in principle, observable, measurable and quantifiable and hence it is physical.

700nm wavelength electromagnetic radiation is observable, measurable, and quantifiable.

"Red" is a much trickier concept. Even if you have a fMRI hooked up to your visual cortex and can demonstrate you're processing pure 700nm light in exactly the same fashion as your buddy, you have no idea if his experience of red is the same as yours.

If that's too high level, consider instead the fact that the color you experience when viewing 700nm light changes depending on what other sorts of light you absorb in other parts of your retina. For example: http://boingboing.net/2008/02/08/color-tile-optical-i.html

Its three needlessly long paragraphs reiterating what was said in the summary and contains links or scans to the ad in question. How did something like this get voted to the front page?

If you're going to link to a site talking about it, at least link to a site that has the ad! Two seconds with Google people, was that really all that hard? I just wish these guys would have mentioned in the ad the combined net worth of all their companies and contrasted it to the net worth of the media empires trying to ram this shit through. Would have really gotten people talking and asking the hard questions.

This is why NO key element in the Internet Backbone should belong to any individual corporation or any individual country. The backlash against the UN owning them was, I think, a serious mistake by geeks.

You contradict yourself. UN ownership is, effectively, license for individual nations to do as they see fit within their own borders, and to legitimise arbitrary control of core elements of the Internet.

That in itself doesn't represent a significant change from the state of things today, except that it provides a framework to drag the entire network down to a lower common denominator where freedom is concerned.

The track record of IT-related UN agencies is decidedly mixed. WIPO has accepted as gospel numerous conceptions about so-called Intellectual Property that are anathema to most people here on Slashdot. Perhaps the most egregious example is of the chair of the organisation suggesting that the World Wide Web should have been patented and licensed. Cory Doctorow rightly calls this statement "a remarkable triumph of ideology over evidence."

The ITU, which is responsible for many telecoms and radio-related standards, fares somewhat better. They render a useful service and have been instrumental in ensuring that telcos world-wide don't end up locking their respective markets away from others. Nonetheless, when some functionaries at the UN-sponsored World Summit on Internet Society suggested in 2004 that the ITU could take ICANN's place, the idea was rejected wholesale.

ICANN sucks in important ways, but it is at least a technical body (influenced, admittedly, more than it should be by Verisign and co.). The imposition of a UN mandate over the Internet almost certainly implies a lot more legislation and regulation than most geeks would want to see.

Let's rename the war on terror to be more accurate too ...

Virtual strip-searches, ball-fondling, never-ending but ineffectual id checks, forcing women to drink their own breast-milk, arbitrary rule enforcement, making everyone go bare-foot, singling-out people by the clothes they wear, forcing people to remove nipple rings with pliers, torturing injured flyers, making people piss on themselves, the list is practically endless.

And yet the TSA hasn't caught a single terrorist.

But they sure are doing a bang-up job of destroying human dignity. Therefore I say we rename the War on Terror to The War on Dignity.

They don't need to own the companies to do their social engineering work...

They just hire third party companies to go online and astroturf the hell out of anything they get their hands on.

Joseph Goebbels would be so proud.

They don't need to own the companies to do their social engineering work...

They just hire third party companies to go online and astroturf the hell out of anything they get their hands on.

Actually, Windows has had a totally baffling directory layout ever since XP.

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/06/25/bill-gates-rant-from.html

Of course not. The problem with a plan like that is in expecting politicians to follow logic and have reasonable arguments. If it happened I'd still expect the politicians to come up with bullshit about patents being good regardless, just like the idiot who is head of WIPO who said the web should have been patented.

http://boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/20111029_NOCERA-IMG-slide-V4QD-articleLarge.jpg

http://boingboing.net/2011/10/29/top-us-foreclosure-law-firm-threw-halloween-party-where-staff-dressed-as-homeless-foreclosed-upon-americans.html

http://boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/20111029_NOCERA-IMG-slide-V4QD-articleLarge.jpg

http://boingboing.net/2011/10/29/top-us-foreclosure-law-firm-threw-halloween-party-where-staff-dressed-as-homeless-foreclosed-upon-americans.html

1) A robot/computer cannot possibly do what I do.

2) OK, it can do a lot, but it can't do everything I do.

3) OK, it can do everything I do, except it needs me when it breaks down, which is often.

4) OK, it operates without failure, but I need to train it for new tasks.

5) Whew, that was a job that no human was meant to do, but what about me?

6) My new job is more fun and pays more now that robots/computers are doing my old job.

7) I am so glad a robot cannot possibly do what I do.

http://boingboing.net/2011/09/29/kevin-kellys-7-stages-of-robot-replacement.html

the levels in the hotspots are very low (though above threshold) and a wall or glass pane would protect you pretty well see http://boingboing.net/2011/10/14/at-a-tokyo-radiation-hotspot-weirdness-abounds.html Best advice is wash the mud away and get on with life.

Steve Jobs says:'I'm going to destroy Android'

What is it with people named Steve and wanting to destroy Google?

Will they be also tweeting things like "the opinion of this court is not available to Public"?

... as a detainee in Guantanamo Bay, I don't find it unlikely that a court ruling (which go to great details explaining their ruling) could contain secret or top secret government information, and as such, in fully appropriate application of law, the opinion of a court concerning national security, and/or secret and top secret government information could totally be classified itself.

Will they be also tweeting things like "the opinion of this court is not available to Public"?

People who want to cheer the downfall of the USA, you can cheer, the soul of that country as envisioned by its founder is dead.

On another topic, Twitter. Bullshit artificial limitation (yeah yeah length of an SMS. What percentage of Twitterers actually use SMS instead of fancy-schmanscy smartphone anyway?) but popular because everyone else is using it...

I've read the essays by RMS and ESR describing the "hacker ethic", and I've read Steven Levy's "Hackers", and those are literally the only places I've ever seen "hacker" used with the positive meaning of unorthodox, enthusiastic, and highly skilled programmers, aside from the occasional references to RMS, ESR, and Levy, to complain about the prevailing usage of the term

The positive definition of the word "hacker" is in wide use in the new DIY community, and I've seen it in Make and of course BoingBoing. It's still in wide use in the subculture that it applies to. Personally I think the media has been getting (slowly) better as well, with the occasional story about hackers that isn't in the negative sense.

Normally I'm a strong supporter of dynamic language, where words mean what they're accepted to mean; I'm just emotionally attached to this particular word and it's hard to let it go. I'm still hoping we don't have to.

No blog or anything like that. However, I will be making a journal when I get to work on the project.

Long-pile fur, custom shaved, either glued or stitched to a body-fitting suit. Headmask will be as fitting as possible, gonna need some excess length to make a nape/wire shroud. Gonna have the guitar plug directly into the suit and broadcast via wireless transmitter. Purely a show/performance suit.

That sounds awesome. Great to see people do interesting things like that.

I only heard of one other person doing anything of the sort.

The bitch, the absolute BITCH, will be getting the tails controlled. That might be linked to another movement or general movement direction.

Yeah, that sounds complicated. Maybe servomotors or voice coils ripped from a hard disk? They'd probably be too weak to do anything too dramatic, but it might work by building up some momentum. Voice coils are really tricky to position precisely (as far as I gather it takes a signal with a rapidly switching polarity with an imbalance in the right direction), but just back and forth is easy, and they're quiet.

The implications of individuals, especially kids, having access to 3D printing is a pretty well-explored scifi trope. Cory Doctrow's Makers, and Bruce Sterling's Kiosk are both based on the concept, reasonably good, and make a solid starting point for implications.

What possible reason is there to fund things any other way?

Because, as my next sentence clearly states, you can fund a project based on benefit provided, rather than use. Certain individuals or corporations stand to lose much more if there is inadequate infrastructure, and stand to gain much more from the maintenance of said infrastructure. It is reasonable for them to pay a larger portion of the construction and maintenance of said infrastructure.

Duh. Businesses don't pay tax. 'Tax on business' ends up being paid either by the employees or the customers; so all the class warriors demanding that 'companies should pay more tax!' are really demanding that 'wages should be lower and prices should be higher!'

Well, since we've got corporate personhood, businesses can pay taxes. If you still insist that people are paying those taxes, I supposed it'd be the shareholders, not the employees or customers, directly paying those costs. I'm okay with that.

Actually, the vast majority of Ig Noble recipients love it. They have a great sense of humor, and several real Nobel prize winners show up to hand out the awards. The awards are mostly a celebration of the quirky and funny, and an honest celebration of obscure and (seemingly) trivial research. Although in one case, an Ig Nobel preceded a real Nobel prize: http://boingboing.net/2010/10/05/scientist-wins-both.html

Given the absence, thus far, of 'heroic cop wounded in line of duty while saving city from anarchist scum' stories, I'm going to go out on a limb and suspect that the protesters represent no meaningful threat to the cops who've been containing them. And, since riot cops never commit, much less revel in, the sort of activity that makes people call 'cops' 'pigs', I can only assume that the heavily equipped and rather illiberal police forces of New York have been defending one of the major local industries from outsiders with considerable zeal...

Sorry, but you're not going to be able to replicate World of Warcraft in Javascript...

Well, probably not, but there is still a lot of fun to be had. Check out this little parody.

If you were born in the late 70's, are reading this article, and like fiction, consider reading Ready: Player One.

It's founded on the same premise -- video games become the metaverse. But what if that metaverse was written by Richard Garriott? And cost just one quarter to play? I read it, and just loved it. Even my 10 year old daughter loved it!

is NOT FREE!

A Belated Happy Mexican Independence Day !

Yours In Tijuana,
Kilgore Trout, C.I.O.

because the only thing more expensive than ink toner is human blood. oh wait...

Actually, there were some videos of pipe bending robots that made the rounds on the web recently that make Mr. Rodriquez look like a look like a incompetent toddler. Downright fluid and graceful.

It's not about efficiency rather safety. Edison already proved that AC kills elephants. Betcha didn't know that!

...and he proved the electric chair kills Humans. :)

It's not about efficiency rather safety. Edison already proved that AC kills elephants. Betcha didn't know that!

The math is more complicated than that. You have to take work (for 40 of those 50 years) and sleep into account, which makes your working out time more 'expensive' (a bigger chunk of your available leisure time). On top of that, you have to take into account that those three years are tagged on at the end of your life, meaning you would be retired, meaning you would get more time back. So effectively you're investing a scarce commodity now (time you don't work or sleep) for a more abundant supply of it later.

You could of course work out in dead time. Take a walk during your lunchbreak. Bike (part of the way) to work some days. Get a desk exercise machine or a treadmill desk.

For example I believe if one adheres to the old testament prohibitions against eating certain types of seafood then one will avoid most of the unsafe species in that part of the world.

Bullshit. The injunctions against certain food were based simply on the personal preference of a few people with schizotypal personalities. This video is a very engaging explanation of the connection between craziness and religion via OCD-type behavior.

Partial disproof of what you say can be found in the middens of Ancient Near Eastern people: civilizations eating pork and shellfish lived next door to Jewish civilizations that didn't, and there's no indication one thrived worse than the other.

Don't throw the "ignorant" label around unless you're prepared to be stuck with it yourself in face of evidence.