samu

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• Commented on Daredevil LA tagger "Buket" of YouTube fame gets nearly 4 years in jail.
  @MGFarrelly "community service (perhaps working with kids and young adults on legal murals and art projects?)" A nice idea, but the video offers no evidence that he has any applicable skills....
• Commented on Daredevil LA tagger "Buket" of YouTube fame gets nearly 4 years in jail.
  That kind of sentence does seem obscene at first, but given the danger to others and the repeat offences … I don't know. I'd have more sympathy if the graffiti was less feeble, maybe. "Expression"? He must have more to...
• Commented on Prominent Black professor arrested for entering own home while Black
  "S sd tht BB s bcmng th lft vrsn f Fx Nws. Whtvr, crt yr wn rlty." Why was this disemvowelled? I don't agree with him, but it IS pretty sad if something this tame gets picked out for cnsrshp....
• Commented on God Hates the World, by Westboro Baptist Church
  Got to recommend "The Most Hated Family In America" by the excellent Louis Theroux. He has a gift for dealing with these subjects, and makes sadness and pity for the church's member/victims win out over anger and loathing. At least...
• Commented on Rushkoff on Apple fanboy rage at Steve Jobs for having the audacity to have had a liver transplant
  OS war on BB?! The portrayal of OS X as exclusively for computer illiterates is flawed. There are extensive geeky nether-regions to be explored in AppleScript and the Unix dungeons which lurk below. (Anonymous #25, Leopard is a certified Unix...
• Commented on Rushkoff on Apple fanboy rage at Steve Jobs for having the audacity to have had a liver transplant
  I skim through various Apple and general tech blogs, podcasts and so on, and this is the first I've heard of any anger directed at Jobs. From the article, it seems to emanate entirely from the business sphere. Some Business...
• Commented on Pixar Grants Dying Kid's Last Wish to See "Up"
  "At the time of her death, her stomach was about 94 inches around, swollen with fluids the cancer wouldn’t let her body properly digest. The rest of her body probably weighed about 45 pounds... Colby couldn't see the screen because...
• Commented on Chinese provincial government orders local officials to smoke more
  @Linds, that shouldn't be an issue for numbers as low as this....
• Commented on Tory MP says it was OK to bill taxpayer for his 500 tree forest, critics are "jealous" of his private forest
  @IMIPAK, "The Additional Costs Allowance reimburses Members for additional expenses incurred in staying overnight away from their main home while performing Parliamentary duties." It's not simply a gift to compensate for their meagre salary of £64,766. http://www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/M05.pdf...
• Commented on London Times on the Honda Insight: "Biblically terrible"
  "The Times" doesn't work very well in many contexts outside the British, because there are other newspapers referred to that way. It will not reliably avoid confusion. "The London Times" works, with the sole, minor downside that it occasionally incites...
• Commented on CCTV birdhouse
  I LOVE Manufactum. It's like a kind of old-fashioned Teutonic Muji. Their pen roll is particularly fine, as is its description. But, conspiracy time... I can't find the CCTV birdhouse in the UK store......
• Commented on Chinese provincial government orders local officials to smoke more
  The Chinese sources I've found refer, I think, to 23,000 cigarettes, not 230,000 packs: http://jx.people.com.cn/GB/channel3/35/200905/05/79151.html http://news.sohu.com/20090503/n263746441.shtml Even so......
• Commented on The Doctor Will Sue You Now: the missing chapter of Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science" about the selling of vitamin therapy instead of anti-virals to AIDS patients in South Africa
  I read about this on http://www.badscience.net/category/matthias-rath/ a while back. Rath makes me wish I believed in hell....
• Commented on Michael Kontopoulos' sculptures that almost tip themselves over
  Great, but they don't tip quite far enough for my liking. I never really felt they were going to tip. Reminds me of Jam's suicide by jumping 40 times from the second floor......
• Commented on Modern life is broken -- why?
  "So, the pharmacist knew it was for a dog, but it's not her job to decide not to put the sticker on it." The sticker has the dosage instructions on it, printed onto a label which already carries the warnings....
• Commented on Modern life is broken -- why?
  The Secret Bunker is a museum in an old nuclear bunker: http://www.hackgreen.co.uk/Hack_Green_History/hack_green_history.htm The sign is broken if by "broken" you mean amusing, eye-catching and the generator of more publicity than the place would ever otherwise have received....
• Commented on British cops identify 200 schoolchildren as potential terrorists
  My first reaction to this: WTF?! My second: When a young person blows up a bus or shoots up a school, there are very often questions about how this or that "tell-tale sign" could possibly have been overlooked. Similar investigations...
• Commented on Darkly Surreal UK Comedy Masterpiece "Jam"
  (Apologies for shady filesharing site. George Carey, by the way, was the Archbishop of Canterbury.)...
• Commented on Darkly Surreal UK Comedy Masterpiece "Jam"
  The doctor is my favourite; he gets the voice and mannerisms exactly right: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jux-Zi-IucU Beware, American brothers, of socialized medicine, lest ye fall into such a pitiful state as this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCtG5_yKafE And finally, the unbroadcastable... http://www.zshare.net/audio/5773626979689881/...
• Commented on China's mondegreen war on net-censorship
  stuckinkiel, I think 操 is just used as a slightly less filthy alternative to 肏. For the benefit of other readers, 肏 (meaning, as we've seen, "fuck") consists of 入, meaning "entry", and 肉, meaning "meat". Delightfully graphic :D...
• Commented on Australia's Great Firewall collapses under political pressure!
  To clarify, I'm not arguing that the blacklist should be secret. The very fact that it can't realistically be adequately transparent is an argument against having one at all....
• Commented on Australia's Great Firewall collapses under political pressure!
  Of course, but any open blacklist would have to be heavily edited or vague, at least in parts, to the point of uselessness. And how far could anyone trust an only partially open list?...
• Commented on Australia's Great Firewall collapses under political pressure!
  It's likely that the list is secret to avoid publicising the sites in question; otherwise it could be used as a guide by people looking for child porn, which is less than ideal....
• Commented on BBC tapes people slipping on icy steps in London
  60% of our news, too....
• Commented on BBC tapes people slipping on icy steps in London
  I live just round the corner. The BBC shouldn't have needed to warn anyone, given the obvious snow and ice, to say nothing of the piles of shattered corpses at the bottom of the steps, with swarms of Dickensian street...
• Commented on Your brain on fiction: we simulate action we read in narrative
  I don't feel any resistance at all when I try to imagine my mother committing an axe murder. Should I worry about her, or myself?...
• Commented on Putin slaps down Michael Dell at Davos
  Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMR1BZ9aYM8 Dell was tweaking the tiger's tail with that intro: "“Mister Prime Minister, you spoke of the dangers of excessive government involvement, and I found myself really struck by that comment and surprised to hear that comment. Six months...
• Commented on Suburban Japan: 2
  "The first and last lines manage to convey a message, but the middle line remains wonderfully mysterious—to me, at least." RISING reverses common sense = Don't bother getting out of bed? @Beaufort: "Are the Japanese not worried about losing cultural...
• Commented on Problem of saggy-pants "much bigger" than Constitution, says Mayor
  I've seen that before; it's five separate handkerchiefs, with a bespoke compression pocket to accommodate them....
• Commented on Zimbabwean $100 trillion note
  There are more than a couple of problems with the idea of white* guys with guns charging into Africa in order to bring peace and stability, but I still often wish when I read about Zimbabwe that we hadn't pissed...