Water from the Hudson may be drinkable, but it is not potable. Water from the Chicago River is neither. Honestly, when they dump the food coloring into the Chicago River on St. Patrick's Day and it goes radioactive green for miles around it looks more appetizing than it does at any other point in the year -- the color and consistency of lime jello!
Never had a problem. Of course, I use Firefox, a NAT, and don't visit porn sites or use P2P, which pretty much cuts my attack vectors to zero. Haven't had any AdWare in, hmm, 4 years or so either. I have AdAware installed on my computer but haven't bothered running it in about 2 years since it never picks up anything.
Now I'm using IE7 as my main browser (quiet!) and don't anticipate any problems with it, either. Heck, its *more* paranoid than FF is some of the time (it will quibble about http refresh redirects to executables, for example).
... considering his name is, in Japanese, identical to Toyota (the car manufacturer/business conglomerate, and incidentally also a common last name, like Toyoda). You just have to know based on the person/company which pronunciation it has. This is one of the reasons Toyota generally spells the Toyota in katakana (a set of characters generally used for writing foreign words, italics, and other strange edge cases) rather than kanji (Chinese characters, like a name would typically be written in), because they have some chance of saying somebody writing "Toyota" in katakana is referring to them rather than themselves.
Other fun Toyota trivia: the top result on Google for both Toyota/Toyoda in kanji (identical, remember) is Toyota City, which is Toyota's company town in Aichi Prefecture. Well, if I were being honest pretty much the whole of Aichi Prefecture (at least Nagoya and the surrounding environs) is a Toyota company town. I know a friend who lived in Nagoya: his dad works for a company which supplies Toyota with parts, his mom is a teller at a bank which Toyota owns, his brother is a R&D guy at one of the non-car Toyota companies, and before he got his own job in Tokyo he worked nights at a convinience store owned by, well, take a guess. I'm amazed its even legal to drive a non-Toyota car there sometimes.
... you're not hard-core enough. Standing in line doesn't have anything to do with the PS3, its all about *them* and how *they* are such big fans that they *stood in line for a week to play the PS3*. Its a mark of social status and something you can bet they will brag about for years.
Now, personally, I'd rather brag "I went into the store and pre-ordered a Wii. Took about 45 seconds. Thats about what its going to take me on December 2nd, too". I guess I just did.
I have more affection for some of my non-plot characters in Disgaea ("Noooo, don't hit Margaret with the fireball, she only has 250 hp and is weak against OH YOU BASTARD YOU WILL PAY FOR THAT") than I do for any of the characters in FFXII. Not a single one of which I can name at the moment, incidentally. Vann or something? Vash? Whatever, whinny effeminate boy who is dating forgettable Japanese girl (who wears both the pants and the shirt in that relationship) and fated to rescue princess in distress, who currently hates his guts but we all know that will change. Throw in bunny-rabbit-who-looks-like-Storm, tank-straight-out-of-WoW-raid, and Air Pirate to round out the cast. They're trying to save the dutchy of whocares from the empire of whatever, which they can only do by gathering... what was it, I forget. Probably crystals. Thats generally a safe bet for a FF game, isn't it? I remember they spent some time in a mine. Was I trying to find a crystal? Or was I just trying to find the next cutscene? I don't know.
I notice one of TFAs says there is no main character, which is more or less true -- I was equally bored with all of them. The only time one shows a spark of that old Square spirit is when Air Pirate says, ironically, "I'll tell you who I am: I am the main character of this story!" And for a brief period of perhaps 15 seconds I was thinking "Alright, I have passed the boring prologue, now we are going to get to some ADVENTURE". Nope.
It was about 10 years ago when I played FFVI for the first time, and you can see how low Square has fallen in the plot and memorable character department. Compare Air Pirate Dude with Edgar. The very first time you meet Edgar, he shows more panache than the entire party has in the time I've played FFXII. I remember his lines from a decade ago ("First, I'm captivated by your beauty. Second, I'm dying to know if I'm your type. I suppose your... abilities are a distant third consideration.") FFXII, I swear, its been maybe two months and I would have to wrack my brains to dredge up anything related to the plot or characters. Marle? Marsh? Whoseherface, the princess. I remember her skill readout like it was yesterday (I was aiming for white mage with a sword). Can't remember a thing she ever said.
... strip out anything which incorporates a word from the title or the name of the editor. And, since words from the title (thank you, but I understood that "Vista delayed again" was related to "Vista" and "delayed" without the helpful Web2.0 crew digesting it for me), fud/notfud, and stupid jokes comprise the entire set of Slashdot tags, we can just optimize out the feature to save screen space.
... run on Windows? I've been using JMoney, which has much of the functionality which I need but, and I know this is shocking for an open source app, some usability and interface issues. Guess I should just remember to buy MS Money with my next Dell...
... not. I was walking through the mall yesterday and decided to poke my head inside the video game shop (n.b. I live in central Japan in a city of 150,000). There was a sign up saying "Now accepting Wii pre-orders", which must have happened in the last week or so since they didn't know when it was going to start on the 1st when I asked. I said "Excuse me, I'd like to pre-order a Wii". I put my name and phone number down on a ticket, got my copy, and told them I wouldn't need a reminder phone call. They said I'd have three days to pick up my Wii before they gave it to someone else. No deposit, no bundle, no hassle, no waiting in lines, and apparently no serious competition to get one here. I have this funny feeling that Nintendo is just saying "Screw console launch tradition, we're going to have one for every family that wants one, and priced to move." Either that or the rest of Japan is much, much less excited by the new Zelda than I am. Time will tell.
... "eat it alive" is exactly the NetHack mentality. Just don't do it to a cockatrice. Bad idea unless you've been polymorphed into something with immunity to stoning, have a ring of anti-petrification, etc. Oh, don't eat Pestilence alive, either. Save that for trolls, it stops them from regenerating. (No, really, I swear: this is Informative, not Funny.)
... back when I was saying the same things about the DS with its wonky two screens and, get this, a stylus input for a video game. Then I met Kirby. All I can say is Wiiiiiiiiiiiii I'm a convert now.
... then you can make a dirty bomb. And if you're a Boy Scout with a couple hundred dollars lying around and some high school nuclear chemistry knowledge, you can set up a nuclear reactor. http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html
Aside from the, hmm, 2 people in the country who think there is a "u" in America, it would appear that that particular domain isn't being used for fat-fingered folks (u is nowhere near either c or a on the keyboard -- you have to go out of your way to hit it), so it is probably being used for phishing. The hope is that someone is less than cautious in reading it and doesn't recognize the inserted letter. Lets say someone decides to match up the first six letters of the domain exactly and then inserts one letter at an arbitrary point elsewhere. To combat this, bank of america would have to buy over *twenty tril1ion* domains which are equally as likely as bankofamericua.com (26 letters to insert, 8 positions to insert them at, 26^8 = lots). And that would only defend against *one* particular style of typo-squatting. If you combine the "insert a random letter" trick with "replace the I in America with a 1", then that is another twenty trillion domains to you have to buy.
P.S. Slashdotters who think you are immune because you are always a careful reader -- how many of you caught the phisher-style substitution I made in this post? Your brain is hard-wired to ignore the sort of slight differences that your computer is wired to treat as very serious.
I get roughly 1000 pieces of spam per day (spread across 6 email accounts -- the big offenders are Yahoo Japan, which came with my BB service and gave me an alternate email address which is algorithmically guessable, and my college account which I used when I was young and stupid and has been floating around the spam lists ever since). Of these, a grand total of five will penetrate POPFile (Bayesian filtering and thats all). Of the 300 non-spam mails (and perhaps 25 mails of interest, the rest being work-wide distribution lists and various automated stuff that I filter-and-forget), I temporarily lose about one every two weeks, which I generally catch with a quick scan of my spam bucket for ham keywords (I would whitelist them, but it would cause more spam to fall through on a daily basis than I'm comfortable with, so I just do my pull-wheat-from-chaff routine every 10 days instead of every 10 minutes).
Now, I will say this: if you are a non-technical user who can't set up POPfile for yourself, I think email is very close to failing if not already there, especially for folks who have maintained the same address for a while. The problem isn't server loads or bandwidth or disk space. The problem is that the usefulness of email as an application is getting subverted by the costs spam imposes on senders and recipients of legitimate email. You can no longer count on guaranteed mail delivery (spare me the egghead response about email delivery having never been guaranteed -- I know the RFCs say that but Joe Average understands email to be as reliable and instant as a phone call, because thats the way it has been and thats the way it was pitched to him), and you have to spend almost as much time on non-productive tasks (digging through spam) as you do on productive tasks (receiving and acting upon information).
That explanation is a load of malarky. Try searching for Tianamen Square (note poor spelling): you find the picture. Try searching on proper spelling: whoops, no picture. Try searching for "six four" in Chinese, which (I'm told) is as unambiguous if you're Chinese as the spoken words "nine eleven" are to an American, and you'll get... actually, I'm not sure what you'll get, because after about ten minutes of searching politically sensitive terms on Google China I now get my connection reset every time I try to connect to them. Cute, guys. OK, we'll try an anonymous proxy, here we go, that works.
Yep, as I expected, *no image search results whatsoever*. Sounds strange, given that "64" should be showing up in all sorts of documents, right? After all, its a freaking number. Search for a random two digit number and you'd expect to get scads of documents, right? 63 gets hundreds of results. 65 gets hundreds of results. 64 gets consigned to the memory hole. Don't believe me? http://images.google.cn/images?svnum=10&hl=zh-CN&l r=&nojs=1&q=%E5%85%AD%E5%9B%9B to do it on Google China and http://images.google.co.jp/images?svnum=10&hl=ja&l r=&q=%E5%85%AD%E5%9B%9B to do the exact same search on Google Japan . (You'll note the image results you see are from Chinese-language sources. Japanese people don't refer to the event as 6-4 any more than they refer to 9-11 as 9-11: off the top of my head, 9-11 is the "American simultaneous terror attacks" or/bei doujihatsu tero kougeki/, don't know what they call the Tiananmen Square incident. Probably "Tiananmen Square incident".)
It requires first-order willful ignorance of the facts to conclude this behavior is the result of anything but censorship.
Well, he could go get some excercise and come back and tell us about how he bogeyed the three-par because his four-iron slices poorly. Or he could take up a more traditional hobby, lets say wood-carving, and come back with his frustrations at finding a good glue that will bond cedar but still stand up to sanding and not gum up a circular saw when you put it through. The game isn't a life. Golf isn't a life. Wood-carving isn't a life. They're all hobbies, and they all sound really crazy ("Do you REALLY spend 6-8 hours at a time alone in a cramped little room around machinery which could kill you at any time trying to make wooden ducks? What are you going do DO with the ducks? Put them on your shelf? Who needs a wooden duck?! Man, you have to get out more!" "Do you REALLY spend 6-8 hours at a time alone in a cramped room surrounded by musty tomes written by dead white males? What are you, some kind of weirdo? What is the attraction of Victorian mystery novels anyhow? Man, you have to get out more!") if you don't personally enjoy them.
>>... otherwise it is taxation without representation, eh? >>
No. The complaint about "taxation without representation" means something different entirely. The complaint was not that Britain didn't provide infrastructure in the colonies. They did, indisputably -- magistrates, courts, soldiers, all that jazz. The problem was that Britain refused to allow the Americans a say in how they were governed, both in how the money was spent and how those magistrates, courts, and soldiers acted. They could, for example, have one of their magistrates order the dissolution of the legislatures of the various colonies for any reason whatsoever, and the colonists had no redress against this. (See Declaration of Independence, its one of the "He has..." list of George III's usurpations.)
Now, an Australian paying taxes on his income from Second Life has both representation (he can ring the chap he voted into parliament and say "Hey, this tax on my Second Life earnings is irksome, cut it out. And by the way I have a pothole outside of my house, see that something gets done about it. Oh, and I'm not too thrilled about our foreign policy lately, change it." and vote against him if he doesn't like the response) as well as infrastructure (minimally, the physical security of the Australian while he is playing Second Life is partially ensured by men paid with tax dollars who stand ready to do violence on his behalf if required).
People are so romantic about the idea that life exists outside earth that, despite the lack of any evidence for its existence, and the consistent failure to find it or even find evidence that there is any environment capable of supporting it, they still believe in it. And the rest of us get to foot a couple gazillion dollars to shoot off probes which invariably return the result: "Have arrived on Mars. Still red, dry, cold, and rocky. Moved 100 yards, was kind of fun. Please insert $250 million to continue."
I suppose microbes can probably live in thetans, too, and evidence for their existence on Mars is about as good as evidence for the existence of liquid water.
The bottom of the page says something to the effect of "We are limiting the results of this search to comply with local laws" (apologies for inexact translation -- I can only read Chinese by way of Japanese).
www.e-junkie.com will let you do this. You upload MyCoolSong.mp3, and pay them $5 a month (more if you have more than X particular files you want to distribute). Then you configure your Paypal account to send them the IPN information (takes about 3 seconds). Every time someone presses your Pay You Money button they get redirected to a download link afterwards. If they were to hypothetically mail that download link to a friend the friend would find it doesn't work for them. The MP3 itself is not drmed, of course.
I use e-junkie for selling software and it works like a charm (I don't need the download link feature, but they also can be configured to send a "Thanks for your purchase!" email with the Registration Key in it, which was the core feature I needed. $5 a month saves me from having to hack together a perl script to accomplish the same thing.)
1. Criticize the content industries for having crap products. 2. Get the exact same crap products off of Bittorrent. 3. Get arrested. 4. Whinge about it.
Lets review, shall we: if you hate Hollywood/Sony/the RIAA/EA/pick-your-boogeyman then *get your stuff elsewhere*. Nobody puts a gun to your head and says "You have to pay me $99.99 for Oops I Did It With Madden of the Sith 2007", unless for some strange reason you actually want to use that garbage. If you do, pay for it. If you don't, there are other sources for video games/movies/pop music/yadda yadda. And if you go to those other sources and say "Hey, this is nice, but this movie doesn't have the special effects that I expect with my $200 million summer blockbuster extravaganza" then, hate the break it to you, but the only participant in the system with a problem is you.
... had an opportunity to vote on your state's murder statute either. Or, more to the point, that guy creeping up behind you never voted on it. Never even asked to be a member of this country, either. Show *him* the signature. Of course, in my experience anarchists always seem to learn the value of police and courts when it is their own lives and/or property in danger.
The US version of representational democracy / republic isn't a total crock of ****:) Its the least worst of all systems anybody has managed to come up with. Anarchists say "Ahh, but its still a bad system, we'd be better off with no system", which just means you end up with a dictatorial government by whoever owns the guns when the current government goes under. Given that I'm 120 lbs and have never fired a gun outside of Duck Hunt I rather hope we don't go Hobbesian tomorrow.
Slashdot Mirror
"I have a disease, and the only cure for it, is more cowbell..." then start playing Windows error sounds.
Water from the Hudson may be drinkable, but it is not potable. Water from the Chicago River is neither. Honestly, when they dump the food coloring into the Chicago River on St. Patrick's Day and it goes radioactive green for miles around it looks more appetizing than it does at any other point in the year -- the color and consistency of lime jello!
Never had a problem. Of course, I use Firefox, a NAT, and don't visit porn sites or use P2P, which pretty much cuts my attack vectors to zero. Haven't had any AdWare in, hmm, 4 years or so either. I have AdAware installed on my computer but haven't bothered running it in about 2 years since it never picks up anything.
Now I'm using IE7 as my main browser (quiet!) and don't anticipate any problems with it, either. Heck, its *more* paranoid than FF is some of the time (it will quibble about http refresh redirects to executables, for example).
George Lucas was responsible for *both* the Empire Strikes Back and Jar Jar Binks. I rest my case.
... considering his name is, in Japanese, identical to Toyota (the car manufacturer/business conglomerate, and incidentally also a common last name, like Toyoda). You just have to know based on the person/company which pronunciation it has. This is one of the reasons Toyota generally spells the Toyota in katakana (a set of characters generally used for writing foreign words, italics, and other strange edge cases) rather than kanji (Chinese characters, like a name would typically be written in), because they have some chance of saying somebody writing "Toyota" in katakana is referring to them rather than themselves.
Other fun Toyota trivia: the top result on Google for both Toyota/Toyoda in kanji (identical, remember) is Toyota City, which is Toyota's company town in Aichi Prefecture. Well, if I were being honest pretty much the whole of Aichi Prefecture (at least Nagoya and the surrounding environs) is a Toyota company town. I know a friend who lived in Nagoya: his dad works for a company which supplies Toyota with parts, his mom is a teller at a bank which Toyota owns, his brother is a R&D guy at one of the non-car Toyota companies, and before he got his own job in Tokyo he worked nights at a convinience store owned by, well, take a guess. I'm amazed its even legal to drive a non-Toyota car there sometimes.
... you're not hard-core enough. Standing in line doesn't have anything to do with the PS3, its all about *them* and how *they* are such big fans that they *stood in line for a week to play the PS3*. Its a mark of social status and something you can bet they will brag about for years. Now, personally, I'd rather brag "I went into the store and pre-ordered a Wii. Took about 45 seconds. Thats about what its going to take me on December 2nd, too". I guess I just did.
I have more affection for some of my non-plot characters in Disgaea ("Noooo, don't hit Margaret with the fireball, she only has 250 hp and is weak against OH YOU BASTARD YOU WILL PAY FOR THAT") than I do for any of the characters in FFXII. Not a single one of which I can name at the moment, incidentally. Vann or something? Vash? Whatever, whinny effeminate boy who is dating forgettable Japanese girl (who wears both the pants and the shirt in that relationship) and fated to rescue princess in distress, who currently hates his guts but we all know that will change. Throw in bunny-rabbit-who-looks-like-Storm, tank-straight-out-of-WoW-raid, and Air Pirate to round out the cast. They're trying to save the dutchy of whocares from the empire of whatever, which they can only do by gathering... what was it, I forget. Probably crystals. Thats generally a safe bet for a FF game, isn't it? I remember they spent some time in a mine. Was I trying to find a crystal? Or was I just trying to find the next cutscene? I don't know.
I notice one of TFAs says there is no main character, which is more or less true -- I was equally bored with all of them. The only time one shows a spark of that old Square spirit is when Air Pirate says, ironically, "I'll tell you who I am: I am the main character of this story!" And for a brief period of perhaps 15 seconds I was thinking "Alright, I have passed the boring prologue, now we are going to get to some ADVENTURE". Nope.
It was about 10 years ago when I played FFVI for the first time, and you can see how low Square has fallen in the plot and memorable character department. Compare Air Pirate Dude with Edgar. The very first time you meet Edgar, he shows more panache than the entire party has in the time I've played FFXII. I remember his lines from a decade ago ("First, I'm captivated by your beauty. Second, I'm dying to know if I'm your type. I suppose your... abilities are a distant third consideration.") FFXII, I swear, its been maybe two months and I would have to wrack my brains to dredge up anything related to the plot or characters. Marle? Marsh? Whoseherface, the princess. I remember her skill readout like it was yesterday (I was aiming for white mage with a sword). Can't remember a thing she ever said.
... strip out anything which incorporates a word from the title or the name of the editor. And, since words from the title (thank you, but I understood that "Vista delayed again" was related to "Vista" and "delayed" without the helpful Web2.0 crew digesting it for me), fud/notfud, and stupid jokes comprise the entire set of Slashdot tags, we can just optimize out the feature to save screen space.
... run on Windows? I've been using JMoney, which has much of the functionality which I need but, and I know this is shocking for an open source app, some usability and interface issues. Guess I should just remember to buy MS Money with my next Dell...
... not. I was walking through the mall yesterday and decided to poke my head inside the video game shop (n.b. I live in central Japan in a city of 150,000). There was a sign up saying "Now accepting Wii pre-orders", which must have happened in the last week or so since they didn't know when it was going to start on the 1st when I asked. I said "Excuse me, I'd like to pre-order a Wii". I put my name and phone number down on a ticket, got my copy, and told them I wouldn't need a reminder phone call. They said I'd have three days to pick up my Wii before they gave it to someone else. No deposit, no bundle, no hassle, no waiting in lines, and apparently no serious competition to get one here. I have this funny feeling that Nintendo is just saying "Screw console launch tradition, we're going to have one for every family that wants one, and priced to move." Either that or the rest of Japan is much, much less excited by the new Zelda than I am. Time will tell.
... "eat it alive" is exactly the NetHack mentality. Just don't do it to a cockatrice. Bad idea unless you've been polymorphed into something with immunity to stoning, have a ring of anti-petrification, etc. Oh, don't eat Pestilence alive, either. Save that for trolls, it stops them from regenerating. (No, really, I swear: this is Informative, not Funny.)
... back when I was saying the same things about the DS with its wonky two screens and, get this, a stylus input for a video game. Then I met Kirby. All I can say is Wiiiiiiiiiiiii I'm a convert now.
... because its not like they have a cheap, abundant source of power anywhere.
... then you can make a dirty bomb. And if you're a Boy Scout with a couple hundred dollars lying around and some high school nuclear chemistry knowledge, you can set up a nuclear reactor. http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html
Aside from the, hmm, 2 people in the country who think there is a "u" in America, it would appear that that particular domain isn't being used for fat-fingered folks (u is nowhere near either c or a on the keyboard -- you have to go out of your way to hit it), so it is probably being used for phishing. The hope is that someone is less than cautious in reading it and doesn't recognize the inserted letter. Lets say someone decides to match up the first six letters of the domain exactly and then inserts one letter at an arbitrary point elsewhere. To combat this, bank of america would have to buy over *twenty tril1ion* domains which are equally as likely as bankofamericua.com (26 letters to insert, 8 positions to insert them at, 26^8 = lots). And that would only defend against *one* particular style of typo-squatting. If you combine the "insert a random letter" trick with "replace the I in America with a 1", then that is another twenty trillion domains to you have to buy.
P.S. Slashdotters who think you are immune because you are always a careful reader -- how many of you caught the phisher-style substitution I made in this post? Your brain is hard-wired to ignore the sort of slight differences that your computer is wired to treat as very serious.
I get roughly 1000 pieces of spam per day (spread across 6 email accounts -- the big offenders are Yahoo Japan, which came with my BB service and gave me an alternate email address which is algorithmically guessable, and my college account which I used when I was young and stupid and has been floating around the spam lists ever since). Of these, a grand total of five will penetrate POPFile (Bayesian filtering and thats all). Of the 300 non-spam mails (and perhaps 25 mails of interest, the rest being work-wide distribution lists and various automated stuff that I filter-and-forget), I temporarily lose about one every two weeks, which I generally catch with a quick scan of my spam bucket for ham keywords (I would whitelist them, but it would cause more spam to fall through on a daily basis than I'm comfortable with, so I just do my pull-wheat-from-chaff routine every 10 days instead of every 10 minutes).
Now, I will say this: if you are a non-technical user who can't set up POPfile for yourself, I think email is very close to failing if not already there, especially for folks who have maintained the same address for a while. The problem isn't server loads or bandwidth or disk space. The problem is that the usefulness of email as an application is getting subverted by the costs spam imposes on senders and recipients of legitimate email. You can no longer count on guaranteed mail delivery (spare me the egghead response about email delivery having never been guaranteed -- I know the RFCs say that but Joe Average understands email to be as reliable and instant as a phone call, because thats the way it has been and thats the way it was pitched to him), and you have to spend almost as much time on non-productive tasks (digging through spam) as you do on productive tasks (receiving and acting upon information).
That explanation is a load of malarky. Try searching for Tianamen Square (note poor spelling): you find the picture. Try searching on proper spelling: whoops, no picture. Try searching for "six four" in Chinese, which (I'm told) is as unambiguous if you're Chinese as the spoken words "nine eleven" are to an American, and you'll get... actually, I'm not sure what you'll get, because after about ten minutes of searching politically sensitive terms on Google China I now get my connection reset every time I try to connect to them. Cute, guys. OK, we'll try an anonymous proxy, here we go, that works.
l r=&nojs=1&q=%E5%85%AD%E5%9B%9B to do it on Google China and http://images.google.co.jp/images?svnum=10&hl=ja&l r=&q=%E5%85%AD%E5%9B%9B to do the exact same search on Google Japan . (You'll note the image results you see are from Chinese-language sources. Japanese people don't refer to the event as 6-4 any more than they refer to 9-11 as 9-11: off the top of my head, 9-11 is the "American simultaneous terror attacks" or /bei doujihatsu tero kougeki/, don't know what they call the Tiananmen Square incident. Probably "Tiananmen Square incident".)
Yep, as I expected, *no image search results whatsoever*. Sounds strange, given that "64" should be showing up in all sorts of documents, right? After all, its a freaking number. Search for a random two digit number and you'd expect to get scads of documents, right? 63 gets hundreds of results. 65 gets hundreds of results. 64 gets consigned to the memory hole. Don't believe me? http://images.google.cn/images?svnum=10&hl=zh-CN&
It requires first-order willful ignorance of the facts to conclude this behavior is the result of anything but censorship.
Well, he could go get some excercise and come back and tell us about how he bogeyed the three-par because his four-iron slices poorly. Or he could take up a more traditional hobby, lets say wood-carving, and come back with his frustrations at finding a good glue that will bond cedar but still stand up to sanding and not gum up a circular saw when you put it through. The game isn't a life. Golf isn't a life. Wood-carving isn't a life. They're all hobbies, and they all sound really crazy ("Do you REALLY spend 6-8 hours at a time alone in a cramped little room around machinery which could kill you at any time trying to make wooden ducks? What are you going do DO with the ducks? Put them on your shelf? Who needs a wooden duck?! Man, you have to get out more!" "Do you REALLY spend 6-8 hours at a time alone in a cramped room surrounded by musty tomes written by dead white males? What are you, some kind of weirdo? What is the attraction of Victorian mystery novels anyhow? Man, you have to get out more!") if you don't personally enjoy them.
>> ... otherwise it is taxation without representation, eh?
>>
No. The complaint about "taxation without representation" means something different entirely. The complaint was not that Britain didn't provide infrastructure in the colonies. They did, indisputably -- magistrates, courts, soldiers, all that jazz. The problem was that Britain refused to allow the Americans a say in how they were governed, both in how the money was spent and how those magistrates, courts, and soldiers acted. They could, for example, have one of their magistrates order the dissolution of the legislatures of the various colonies for any reason whatsoever, and the colonists had no redress against this. (See Declaration of Independence, its one of the "He has..." list of George III's usurpations.)
Now, an Australian paying taxes on his income from Second Life has both representation (he can ring the chap he voted into parliament and say "Hey, this tax on my Second Life earnings is irksome, cut it out. And by the way I have a pothole outside of my house, see that something gets done about it. Oh, and I'm not too thrilled about our foreign policy lately, change it." and vote against him if he doesn't like the response) as well as infrastructure (minimally, the physical security of the Australian while he is playing Second Life is partially ensured by men paid with tax dollars who stand ready to do violence on his behalf if required).
People are so romantic about the idea that life exists outside earth that, despite the lack of any evidence for its existence, and the consistent failure to find it or even find evidence that there is any environment capable of supporting it, they still believe in it. And the rest of us get to foot a couple gazillion dollars to shoot off probes which invariably return the result: "Have arrived on Mars. Still red, dry, cold, and rocky. Moved 100 yards, was kind of fun. Please insert $250 million to continue."
I suppose microbes can probably live in thetans, too, and evidence for their existence on Mars is about as good as evidence for the existence of liquid water.
The bottom of the page says something to the effect of "We are limiting the results of this search to comply with local laws" (apologies for inexact translation -- I can only read Chinese by way of Japanese).
www.e-junkie.com will let you do this. You upload MyCoolSong.mp3, and pay them $5 a month (more if you have more than X particular files you want to distribute). Then you configure your Paypal account to send them the IPN information (takes about 3 seconds). Every time someone presses your Pay You Money button they get redirected to a download link afterwards. If they were to hypothetically mail that download link to a friend the friend would find it doesn't work for them. The MP3 itself is not drmed, of course. I use e-junkie for selling software and it works like a charm (I don't need the download link feature, but they also can be configured to send a "Thanks for your purchase!" email with the Registration Key in it, which was the core feature I needed. $5 a month saves me from having to hack together a perl script to accomplish the same thing.)
1. Criticize the content industries for having crap products.
2. Get the exact same crap products off of Bittorrent.
3. Get arrested.
4. Whinge about it.
Lets review, shall we: if you hate Hollywood/Sony/the RIAA/EA/pick-your-boogeyman then *get your stuff elsewhere*. Nobody puts a gun to your head and says "You have to pay me $99.99 for Oops I Did It With Madden of the Sith 2007", unless for some strange reason you actually want to use that garbage. If you do, pay for it. If you don't, there are other sources for video games/movies/pop music/yadda yadda. And if you go to those other sources and say "Hey, this is nice, but this movie doesn't have the special effects that I expect with my $200 million summer blockbuster extravaganza" then, hate the break it to you, but the only participant in the system with a problem is you.
... had an opportunity to vote on your state's murder statute either. Or, more to the point, that guy creeping up behind you never voted on it. Never even asked to be a member of this country, either. Show *him* the signature. Of course, in my experience anarchists always seem to learn the value of police and courts when it is their own lives and/or property in danger.
:) Its the least worst of all systems anybody has managed to come up with. Anarchists say "Ahh, but its still a bad system, we'd be better off with no system", which just means you end up with a dictatorial government by whoever owns the guns when the current government goes under. Given that I'm 120 lbs and have never fired a gun outside of Duck Hunt I rather hope we don't go Hobbesian tomorrow.
The US version of representational democracy / republic isn't a total crock of ****
I should clarify: parent is fiction.