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... that the reviewer didn't look for 120 Days of Sodom , I guess.

Why would they reject a work from some stuffy old French aristocrat? I've seen worse on 4chan.

... that the reviewer didn't look for 120 Days of Sodom , I guess.

Oh my god! A book that is out of copyright! Quick, let's pass a law to fix that!

Full text available online.

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Good heavens, you must have led a sheltered life. Have you never heard of the Marquis de Sade, Fanny Hill, or Catherine the Great? More than 200 years on, there is still nothing on the Internet to compare to the catalog of perversions in 120 Days of Sodom .

--ccm

The first, higher speed, is "a good thing": A faster connection is always nicer though as many have pointed out the limits are often at the server-end, not the client end. Also the entire ISP model is asynchronous, assuming that we'll all be good little consumers and never be transmitting anything but the occs'l email and requests for more packets, not having our own servers or sending our own audio or video streams.

This is pretty much not what Tim Berners-Lee was thinking when he first developed his World Wide Web, and what he and others have been trying to rectify ever since. Indeed it is contrary to much of the intrinsic nature of the internet architecture where all peers are inherently considered equal and it is all superficially one big dumb network with the clever bits innovating at the edges. Unfortunately this is also pretty much contrary to what ISPs and media companies would very much like everything to be; just another variation of the centralized broadcast model where they plug in a pipe and you get to choose ABC or Disney (oh, they're the same!)

The second topic, monkeying about with what, where, and how packets get transported, is a creeping phenomena that is indeed slowly taking hold. A good early example is the TOS for many of the 'unlimited' wireless digital data services from cellphone companies:

Verizon EDO Terms-of-Service
Unlimited NationalAccess/BroadbandAccess services cannot be used (1) for uploading, downloading or streaming of movies, music or games, (2) with server devices or with host computer applications, including, but not limited to, Web camera posts or broadcasts, automatic data feeds, Voice over IP (VoIP), automated machine-to-machine connections, or peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, or (3) as a substitute or backup for private lines or dedicated data connections.

To borrow a line from HHGTTG:

"Ah," said Arthur, "this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'unlimited' that I wasn't previously aware of."

Already many ISP's block ports, typically port 25 to either stop email spamming or prevent customers from using 3rd party email servers. Also port 139 is often blocked, so Windows users don't accidentally share the contents of their hard drives to the online world. However many go on to block (or significantly degrade traffic on) ports for unambiguously self-interested reasons, such as p2p, or increasingly vendors with whom they compete. One well known example is Telus in Canada who black-holed traffic to a union website (and several thousand other websites unfortunate enough to be co-hosted with it) during a strike. Another is Rogers, also in Canada, who are apparently currently messing about with traffic to/from Apple's iTunes websites.

VOIP is the big target these days. Already several rural US ISPs have had their hands slapped for trying to block it. The ISPs were extensions of the local rural phone companies, heavily Federally subsidized, who'd gone into the data business (also often Federally subsidized). However when their customers stopped making analog calls and started making cheaper VOIP ones they tried to put a stop to this loss of revenue / increase in traffic. Ultimately they were denied this but the issue is one larger and larger ISP's are taking up. BellSouth's chairman and others have increasingly been making their own noises along these lines, and this could indeed be the big flash-point w

Arthur Dent does not end up together with Trillian.
I'll concede this one

Marvin does not save the day.
In the radio play (You know, the ORIGINAL telling of the story, Marvin does indeed save the day at Magrathea.

Trillian does not get kidnapped by Vogons
This had to be put in to make the love-interest part interesting. Whether or not you agree with the love-interest part is a different thing.

There is no backup earth, hence the reason they wanted Arthur's brain.
They were almost done with it. Close enough.

The cult-leader only existed to remove Zaphrod's second head to avoid having to spend money on special effects after that point.
So? Would you rather that they had a cheesy rubber head like in the TV series? Besides, Douglas Adams was the one who wrote the character in.

AND THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE ISN'T AT THE FUCKING EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE.
It was a joke.

I actually brought a towel to this show and threw it away on my way out the door...
Well, that was dumb of you.

"The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope."

Chapter 12

That's actually the goal of government in general, regardless of the party.

There are several writers out there that prove uncategorically that a decline in morality due to a lack of self-control leads the people to elect leaders (tyrants) to control them.

The loss of civil rights you mention is a direct result of people not being able to control themselves. Since we live in societies and need some form of control, in the abscence of self-control we elect leaders who will provide the control that the society requires. This usually takes the form of tyranny.

"Tyranny grows from a lack of self-control. Our passions forge our chains." (Rousseau, quoted in Against Excess, by Mark Kleiman)

"The only completely certain restraint is self-control based on the voluntary acceptance of certain moral and ethical standards and principles." (Philip of England )

See Rome et al for examples.

.

The Apollo landings were all hoaxes.

Similarly we can explain the fact that supposedly 2 out of 2 Mars landers were successful almost 30 years ago while current Mars landers (which cost about the same in real dollars) are likely to fail:

The Viking landings were hoaxes.

I mean to believe otherwise would cast into doubt that the sociopolitical changes of the last 30 years were a true advance.

This is probably a sign that Leif Erikson didn't actually discover the New World. The supposed chronology is that in 1000AD Leif Erikson discovered the New World (aka "Vinnland") at the same time Iceland converetd to Christianity.

That Roman Catholic authorities would have suppressed knowledge of such a discovery for hundreds of years is no more plausible than that little Viking boats navigated harsh arctic waters to the New World hundreds of years before Christopher Columbus, with his enormous merchant ships, succeeded in crossing the Atlantic and setting foot there.

I mean to believe otherwise would cast into doubt that the sociopolitical changes of the first half of the last millenium were a true advance.