RadioGuy

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• Commented on 100-word fiction competition — win an HP MediaSmart EX495
  The lamp turned green and I stopped. Red now, start again. I abandoned her to her complacency. Thirteen months onward, four lifeless worlds apart, ninety-seven seconds and I'll be dead. “It'll be your undoing,” she warned, unclear if she meant...
• Commented on Results of Creative Commons' "noncommercial use" study
  It seems to me the Creative Commons naysayers tend to point out its flaws relative to the GPL or some other ostensibly "freer" license. They may or may not be correct, but I've always thought they're missing the point. For...
• Commented on All publicly funded content should be in the public domain.
  @rrh #80 I'm not sure where you're going with this. You're suggesting the government have the sole rights for five years, and what then? Do the creators then retain sole rights or are all Canadians granted a mechanical right to...
• Commented on All publicly funded content should be in the public domain.
  It seems to me the crux of the issue is a lack of availability of publicly-funded works (this has been mentioned in a number of previous comments as well). [Note that I'm coming from a radio-centric music-licensing background here] What...
• Commented on Arcade in Congo
  @2K #5 That photo's description is "on the set" and it's tagged with "actors."...
• Commented on Locus column: Special Pleading, the dirty rhetorical trick used to disqualify all open publishing successes
  @Jonathan Badger #14 Cory's point, as I understand it, is that people used to say 'free samples' only work for unknown authors. Now they say 'free samples' only work for well-known authors. But it isn't "mutually exclusive" at all. The...
• Commented on Crossed Genres cover art featuring MLK as Terminator, KKK as girl-ninjas, with lashings of go-go boots and jetpacks
  @ace0415 So if the meaning of a work of art is ambiguous, the art is bad and/or distasteful? To me, subtlety and ambiguity of meaning increase the merits of art rather than lessen it. Also (and now I'm just nitpicking),...
• Commented on Visualizing a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book
  Hmmm... With some good OCR software, a little programming and a lot of time feeding pages to the scanner, it probably wouldn't be too difficult to automate production of these graphs. Perhaps I'll add it to my "interesting projects that...
• Commented on Comic-Con: splendid excuse for cosplay-themed pinups
  @frankieboy "Sexy radish" FTW! I'm going to use that phrase in conversation at the earliest opportunity....
• Commented on Fresh Green: Worst Packaging, Human Shrub Attacks English Town, and More
  @Pantograph From the comments section on the "Japan Sizes Of Food" page: snopes.com: Fanta and the Nazis...
• Commented on The Valley
  Did anyone else find that offhand "chloroform" remark moderately disturbing? I suspect it was meant as a simple innocent joke, but the worldview it implies weirded me out a little....
• Commented on Insanely expensive unopened 1967 Star Trek paint-by-numbers
  When I was a kid, I remember coming across some sort of Star Wars roleplaying game book at a liquidation store while visiting the US with my parents. They were selling for $0.25 each, so I bought two, one for...
• Commented on Say Everything, Scott Rosenberg's history of blogging
  @RightReverendRex I just took a quick glance at shift.com via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, but it seems that the Flash/Shockwave files weren't being archived back then (1997-98). Coincidentally, I did come across this Cory Doctorow book review from February...
• Commented on Myth of the Rational Market: the rise and fall of the idea of market rationality
  @Brainspore & Clayton How do you know which books you're going to like before you read them? I suspect Cory meant to write: ...I don't have the patience or time to review books I don't like well enough to recommend......
• Commented on Wear patterns as information leakage from security keypads
  @Yorgle #22 You win the internets, sir. "Plus or minus 20 minutes" made my day....
• Commented on Health insurance versus health
  From the article: The issue isn't that insurance companies are evil. It's that they need to be profitable. They have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit for shareholders. I take issue with that statement. Acting immorally and without compassion purely...
• Commented on Well suited, well lit: First4Figures' ltd. ed. Phazon Suit Samus
  That's seriously hawt. /drool...
• Commented on Earth's magnetic field <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">caused</span> <strong>affected</strong> by ocean currents?
  It must be the ocean currents, because everyone knows the earth is hollow. That's where the unicorns live....
• Commented on Chinese grifters posing as brides work the countryside
  @Kieran O'Neill #8 most hospitals in Canada refuse to tell parents their baby's gender before birth Citation, please? I'm Canadian (live in Ontario), and every pregnant woman I have ever known has been given the option of learning their child's...
• Commented on One shot: Tom Gauld's end of level boss
  It's obviously of prophecy of Fruit F*cker Prime!...
• Commented on Science of orgasm video
  Brings to mind that scene in Clerks: It's important to have a job that makes a difference, boys. That's why I manually masturbate caged animals for artificial insemination....
• Commented on Dear Esther: bizarre, touching Half Life 2 mod
  It ends with the sound of... Probably minor, but, um, spoilers much?...
• Commented on Apple censors NIN iPhone app
  @Enochrewt #7 I say Reznor should pull his albums from iTunes if he's that upset. Otherwise this is just lip service. I could be wrong on this, but I suspect most of the NIN albums are owned by his former...
• Commented on Paul Harvey (RIP)
  My mental association with Paul Harvery is just how awful his technical producer was. Once upon a time, it fell within my responsibilities to download and prep the daily segment for air each morning on the station at which I...
• Commented on Sneaky fake lens lets you take photos at right angle to direction you point the camera
  Is it just me or does #23 seem a bit astroturfy?...
• Commented on Britain's "Great Firewall" set to restrict access to Wikipedia
  (Gosh darn it all to heck, how do you get the quotation icons to manifest?) Like this: <blockquote>some quote</blockquote> Which makes: some quote...
• Commented on Scientists mostly don't know what a "theory" is, but should they?
  Since I have nothing insightful to add to this discussion itself, just wanted to say this has been one of the most fascinating comment threads I've read in a while. It makes me happy to see so many smart folks...
• Commented on William Gibson bags and coats
  @cowboy_k That's cool -- I wasn't aware of the background on the stapler. Of course, the red swingline is such an immediately iconic item, bringing up instant mental images of Milton Waddams....
• Commented on William Gibson bags and coats
  @shanghaied #2 This was only a matter of time I suppose, since his last two books were basically just hundreds of pages of product placements. Gibson wrote about a black Buzz Rickson flight jacket in Pattern Recognition, and lo and...
• Commented on Bank Robber Uses Craigslist To Hire Unsuspecting Accomplices
  Heh, seems this is a popular tactic in movies. Inside Man immediately came to my mind, though now I see many other obvious references mentioned here too....