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In Redmond, Washington J Allard is pressing his fingers together repeatedly saying . . . "Excellent."

Actually, yes we do. Usually however we listen to the full song, so that's really not an issue.

(Sorry for the sarcastic response, it just came so naturally. In truth, I'd never even noticed that there wasn't a FF/rewind button in the Media Player - as sarcastic as my response was, it is the truth).

It's true, the supply chain to keep millions of soldiers in an unconnected part of the world is almost unfathomable.

As for the ROC situation, my personal opinion is that China really doesn't see them as either a) a threat or b) worth invading. The only thing that Taiwan might be doing is stirring up the seeds of rebellion in mainland China, but other than that, there's really not anything the PRC desperately needs.

You're also quite right on the smoking crater; large scale bombardment and/or annihilation is not the aim, control is. China is actually doing a good job maintaining good relations with the Third World in that regard, even if the First World has their misgivings. I lived in Uganda between 1990-2001 and China was a MAJOR importer of things that the Western world wouldn't sell them - namely, military hardware. By doing this, China not only secures goodwill but essentially has the right of first refusal on exports from the country (and really the region - the ties with Tanzania are still strong from their Communist days - Kenya is still too Anglicized for any really strong ties to form). China is much more likely to keep ties strong with the West African nations to secure fossil fuels rather than trying to secure the goodwill of the OPEC nations - the Middle East invasion would really be an option of last resort (sort of like it was for the US - zing!)

Pretty offtopic as far as the article, but interesting nonetheless.

Tasteless and totally off-topic reply, but this just reminded me of a funny story . . . (insert wave-dream transition)

My brother-in-law loves to pose the philosophical hypothetical situation of a person stuck on the stereotypical desert island with a baby. Question is, would you eat the baby (if you do, you survive; if you don't and you die, the baby's screwed anyway).

When he posed this to a friend of ours there was a slight pause at which point he responded (as I would imagine Sony would) . . .

"Is there a blender on the island?"

Actually, my numbers were off, but I really wasn't clear about what I meant.

The number of troops in China is somewhere in the vicinity of 7 million. However, China could amass an army of up to 100 million able bodies.

I'll confess that I don't remember the date of the article, but it was in Time magazine - talking about the rise of China as a superpower and the inevitability of China becoming the #1 superpower in the next 50 years or so; I'll look for the article online and see if I can get the exact figures.

> One of the things I don't get about you Reich-wingers is on one hand you criticize Yurp for being so godless and secular and then on the other you talk about it going Islamic.

A group of people is likely to have more than one opinion on a subject, and no one speaker's opinions are necessarily representative of the rest of the group's. That's probably where you're confused. (Don't take this as an argument that there aren't people who do indeed hold contradictory positions.)

It would be just as uncritical to say that on one hand left-wingers constantly bash Christianity, but on the other hand call anyone racist who speaks out against Islam, the biggest religion after Christianity.

I think the main difference here is that the US has some restraint when it comes to an attack; they don't actually intend to conquer and occupy the nation, just subjugate it/install a puppet government. If the Chinese were to be given sufficient cause to invade a Middle Eastern nation, with an army of over a hundred million IIRC, I don't believe they would have any trouble with a total occupation and assimilation (for example, Tibet - for counter-example-ish, Taiwan).

Whoa - all that "national" stuff is paid for, either directly by taxpayers, or indirectly through bond-holders, or as "consumers." There is no such thing as "government-paid" anything - it all ends up coming out of your pockets, or your kids pockets.

In other words, taxing transactions that don't involve the exchange of legal tender - you know - REAL money - is pure BS, because nothing or REAL value has changed hands. Or will the IRS start accepting payment in Linden Dollars and WoW points?

They'd be totally unaffected if our national government laid down its arms, gave up having a military budget, and let other countries invade at will.

Go look at New Jersey (google for "new jersey the armpit of the world"). Then tell me that letting another country invade it wouldn't be a "Good Thing". Heck, they're probably praying for a hurricane or other natural disaster. http://gilded-messiah.livejournal.com/2004/12/06/0

I'm from New Jersey. That's right, New Jersey. The Armpit of America. The sewage capital of the world. New York's retarded little brother. You can keep your pity, however, because I'm here to defend it, mostly. Like many escaped New Jersey inmates, I have a unique variant of Stockholm syndrome when it comes to my home state. I've fallen in love with my captor.

Don't get me wrong. New Jersey is a cesspool, just as you might have suspected. There really are girls with big hair and awful accents living in malls, women so awful that they turned the governor gay. These women really do have 400 pound boyfriends with hairy backs and low IQs. Turn signals are considered worthless luxury features, and, God help me, the whole state really does smell. However, it's New Jersey's consummate crappiness that ultimately makes it so great.

Radio personality Jean Shepard once said that New Jersey was "the most American of all states. It has everything from wilderness to the Mafia. All the great things and all the worst. For example, Route 22." Route 22, for those of you who don't know, is- I kid you not- a 24 hour strip mall that runs the length of the state. What is more quintessentially New Jersey- nay, more quintessentially American- than that? It's also the only place to go at 3 AM when you decide it's a good time to get some coffee and disco fries, or perhaps visit White Castle, the only burger joint with the gall to call their visibly greasy laxative rat-patties "Sliders."

While not unique to the state, White Castle's hamburgers share a few characteristics with New Jersey: they're both guilty pleasures, they only appeal to a small portion of the population, and they're both ironically nicknamed. New Jersey is, after all, the "Garden State," which in New Jersey-speak means "densely populated paved hellscape." In fact, New Jersey is the most densely populated state of the union, which might lead you to believe that the state is crowded and polluted. It is. But the large population isn't all bad. Because of its population density, New Jersey serves as a cultural microcosm of America as a whole. It is the proverbial "melting pot," where Godless, homosexual, French hippie crackheads live just a stone's throw away from inbred, racist, unwashed redneck crackheads. I know, because they're throwing stones at each other all the time.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking ,"This still sounds completely awful." Like I said earlier, it is awful, and everyone there knows it. For a while, New Jersey considered changing its state song to Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run." Not only would this have been the only state song to contain the word "suicide," but also the only one about trying desperately to get the hell out of the state.

"Do you really think the decadent godless fags of Europe will stand by idle in the face of theocracy?"

You, sir, are completely and utterly clueless about Europe. You have no idea, it is like you are from a different planet. If you in spite of being an AC find a way to offer compelling evidence that you are living in Europe and have so for at least ten years (and hence would know Europe first hand) then I'll gladly transfer you a thousand pounds, as I consider it extremely utterly unlikely.

I would expand on this, but every European who reads this will either 1) know exactly what I am talking about, or 2) label you the racist for somehow construing that the diverse and undeniably steadily growing group of muslim individuals are somehow acting in concert towards a linguistic construct of theocracy, or even that _you_ would be the cause of anything bad happening by implying that it could. But again, however intellectual you may consider yourself, you have absolutely no clue or knowledge of Europe.

"Do you really think the decadent godless fags of Europe will stand by idle in the face of theocracy?"

Yes. Much like WWWII with the Third Reich, France will roll over (they've already started) first and allow theocracy to gain a foothold in Europe makign it much easier for the Jihadist invasion to follow.

This is such transparent bullshit racist propaganda, I can't believe it got modded up.

Did you know that French Muslims are, on average, less anti-Semitic than Americans? One of the things I don't get about you Reich-wingers is on one hand you criticize Yurp for being so godless and secular and then on the other you talk about it going Islamic. Do you really think the decadent godless fags of Europe will stand by idle in the face of theocracy?

Learning to spell "the" correctly: two years of elementary school.
Learning to spell "retarded" correctly: two years of high school.

So I guess that puts you somewhere in the grade 9 range? LOLWTFOMG pwnage!!!11!1! (I kid, I kid).

We went over this above. Old disks will continue to play. However once you put a new disk (newer than the revocation date) in the player, the blacklist is updated and NO disks will play until an updated key is flashed to the player.

For more details - http://www.google.com/.

My sincerest apologies; you are absolutely correct.

The abuse policy http://www.comcast.net/terms/abuse.jsp does not state the hard number (despite our internal literature telling us differently.

A co-worker has stated that it "should" be on the agreement given to the customer at install; I'm looking into that now (yes I'm posting from work). If I can find an external link with the bandwidth cap stated, I'll repost it.