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Tor is slow, but it's fairly random in HOW slow. I believe it depends on the exact route you end up getting sent through. If it's too slow, sometimes I'll request a new identity and end up with a faster connection as it routes me some other way.

As for using it in gaming, er, no. Maybe if you like playing chess. Gaming is highly sensitive to latency. However, for surfing the web, it's good enough, and I'm sure it's already giving no end of trouble to our overlord masters who seek to slap us with a Real Identity.

It's going to be interesting seeing how projects that seek to identify individuals on the web clash with projects like Tor, which work to prevent such things.

It's a shame that we ran out of free space so quickly, so that artists could display their work for all to see without defacing something else, but I guess these are crowded times we live in and they just have to put it where they can. You know, on the sides of buildings, on the sidewalk, in the dirt and now, on top of other people's art. A shame, really. If only there was some place where artists could display art without causing so much trouble. Like, I dunno, a "gallery" or something. I know, me and my crazy ideas.

It's a shame what Chevez is doing to his country and its economy. It's interesting that some of the same people who mock the American administration's "false enemy" of terrorism are hooked like guppies for Chevez's "false enemy" of America.

Just goes to show, you can fool some of the people all of the time.

Pot calling kettle, come in kettle, over.

The key point as to whether or not he's a douchebag seems to be whether you believe his account on page 2. He offered to sell the comics for them and split the profits and showed them a few sample choices of what they were worth, but the sellers weren't interested at all and simply wanted to get rid of everything as quickly as possible for immediate cash.

So he agreed to buy the whole lot by the boxfull and that's how they paid him.

Although once he saw the closet, he probably could have made a better effort to explain to them exactly what they had there.

Still, I agree with AnotherAaron -- the buyer has no moral obligation to make sure you get a good deal. It's capitalism, baby! Seller beware, in this case. Enough people dream about buying a dusty flower pot at a garage sale that turns out to be a Ming Dynasty vase that there's at least two television shows dedicated to the concept.

Apparently "scab picking", "booger flicking" and "anal probing" had already been done.

Shhh, Moony. I'm pretty sure that the trolls you're complaining about are someone else's sockpuppets and I think I know whose, and lets just say that it explains why their trolling is never suppressed.

As for the book theft list, they're probably stealing them for an internet reseller, which would explain why only the most popular books are wanted. The reseller is looking to move volume. I'm sure more than a few eBay sellers get their books (or other wares) from less than honest sources.

They should clearly release all books on the internet with no protection, then we can just download them through Pirate Bay. Stealing actual physical books is such a hassle.

In the words of Terry Pratchett:
"Ignorant: a state of not knowing what a pronoun is, or how to find the square root of 27.4, and merely knowing childish and useless things like which of the seventy almost identical-looking species of the purple sea snake are the deadly ones, how to treat the poisonous pith of the Sago-sago tree to make a nourishing gruel, how to foretell the weather by the movement of the tree-climbing Burglar Crab, how to navigate across a thousand miles of featureless ocean by means of a piece of string and a small clay model of your grandfather, how to get essential vitamins from the liver of the ferocious Ice Bear, and other such trivial matters. It's a strange thing that when everyone becomes educated, everyone knows about the pronoun but no one knows about the Sago-sago."

This is a great idea. I need to renew my license soon and I'm going to march down the middle of the street all the way to the DMV office to protest it not being closer to me.

On the way back, I was thinking of walking by the donut shop to protest it not being closer, too.

In this way, I will convince myself that I'm making an important difference in the world. And also, I can have a donut.

Mmm, donuts.

Westerners don't like Valentines day because it's a "Hallmark Holiday". Saudi Arabia doesn't like Valentines day because it's an excuse for people to show affections towards other people.

I'm not sure which side is crazier.

That was hilarious! Although if they really did it to prove they shouldn't be typecast, they probably shouldn't use the same voices from Spongebob...

Yes, because clearly anyone who is not obsessing over their own appearance must be a virgin, Antinous. Because nothing says, "I'm popular with the opposite sex" like a maximum number of body modifications.

Luckily, there's an entire American industry formed on this very thing. I mean, other than the mass marketing of mirrors.

I'm sure you can think of something.

Sorry, Takuan, I'm afraid that middle east troubles actually pre-date the existence of America. Interesting factoid: the U.S. Navy was first formed to help combat middle eastern attacks on American trade ships.

Meh. No stranger than girls who go for, say, guys with green spikey hair, or goths, or guys with lots of piercings, or tattoos, etc. Lots of people do lots of odd things to themselves and lots of other people, for whatever reason, end up finding it attractive.

Personally, I think the new "exotic" look is actually no makeup, no tattoos, no piercings, no hair coloring and no spray on tan. That's a rare configuration! :-p

If we start listing the inhumane laws of that region and the various violations of human rights, we might never reach the end.

I don't see why cutting the internet to Iran would be seen as an attack on Iran. The people who MOST want to cut off internet access to the Iranian people is the Iranian government and religious leaders, who see the internet as a threat. Iran does have 6 Kilo class submarines, too, so they have the capability and the motive.

Evidence of motive:
Iran bans fast internet

Maybe they just figured out a handy way to ban it completely without causing riots in the streets, since they can pretend it's someone else's fault. Those dirty Israelis and/or Americans, for example.

The US and Israel have the capability but I can't imagine the motive. I think most anti-western internet propoganda comes out of Syria, Iraq and California, not Iran. The better access the Iranian people have to the internet, I think the safer we all are. When the Iranian people have no idea what their government is up to, that's when I'd start to worry.

"Be my valentine... OR ELSE!" :)

I'm just saying, you post a video of an overweight guy firing a gun and look at the comments, so many of which are basically, "someone who doesn't look like me is doing something I don't approve of! Let's make fun of him and talk bad about what he's doing!"

Yet other "alternative" activities will get rave reviews.

It just goes to show, what we have here is not a culture that celebrates diversity but a narrow defined culture of intolerance with a different set of things we find tolerable. Your average "white power" redneck will be all in favor of fat guys firing guns and will be against gay marriage. Your average Boing Boinger seems to be against fat guys firing guns but would be in favor of gay marriage.

It's the same old song, just with a different tune.

Not everything is about you, Tak.

It will be interesting to go back to a model of music where artists must work for donations, commission or concert tickets. It will hearken back to the days of yore, when all those excellent musicians in the 1600's, 1700's and 1800's prospered. Even though most people can only name 2 or 3 of them (if that).

Like it or not, the music recording industry and record sales created an explosion of musical culture as more and more singers, musicians and songwriters found it possible to focus on writing music for a living to the extent that actually PLAYING the music was almost secondary to simply creating it. Its given us an incredible richness and variety of music within the last century. I wonder if this trend can continue for much longer?

It's interesting to see who all had snide remarks to make about this video.

If it had been a video of a gay couple getting married, those same people would have been all in support of it.

"Social liberal" is supposed to mean you're accepting of all sorts of lifestyles and you don't judge people just because they don't live like you do. Instead it seems to be coming to mean "we accept people who live our particular alternative lifestyle and we reject all others". So kinda like conservative Southern Baptists, but with the narrow mindset situated in a different place.

I've always thought that the way to beat terrorists would be to out-money them. When they can make successful attacks with AK-47s, simple explosives and bombs cheap enough that Iran doesn't mind handing them out, they'll keep launching attacks against infidels, which to them is "everyone except us".

When the only attack that's reliable is a depleted uranium tipped missile because we're fighting with adamantium armored super droids, war becomes too expensive for them to engage in and they'll find something better to do, like maybe rediscover their lost heritage and turn the middle east into the heart of civilization it once was.

RHB, you might be interested in reading Alan Greenspan's book, The Age of Turbulence. One of the concepts he expands on in that book is how the success of the western style economy can be partially attributed to protections for property rights.The truth of this became very evident in watching both the collapse of the USSR and the struggles Russia has faced post-collapse. Russia dropped central planning but they didn't engage legal protections for property rights, which is why their economy is still so far behind ours. Basically, without legal protections for your stuff, the desire to make new stuff largely goes away. Instead of a rich economy of competition based around protections, it's all cut throat and theft; the economy stagnates.

The hope for digital media is that this isn't the case, and if all digital media were completely free, everyone would benefit. I'd like to hear a historic example where this has ever been true.

Personally I don't think DRM is the solution and I'm not sure there is a solution, but rather, there will be an inevitable paradigm shift in that digital media is incapable of being anything other than free. I'm not really looking forward to the effect this may have. There will be no more book publishers because everyone can publish books, although nobody will be able to sell them. As much as I would pay Orson Scott Card to keep writing books, I wonder whether I'd have ever heard of him if he had to juggle book writing with his paying job down at the factory.

Well, Tak, the average army soldier isn't much of a match for a .50 cal rifle slug either. Better the robot than one of them. Can probably fix a broken robot for 20 grand. Fixing broken people is harder and more expensive.

I would agree with #2: to my mind, no newspaper is really set apart from any other in terms of journalistic quality. They all seem to just take AP feeds and regurgitate them or do the same thing as every other newspaper, which is feed me outrageous headlines which, when I read the story, have little or nothing to do with the facts of the matter but was instead designed to draw my attention. It works on the short term -- see dramatic headline, buy newspaper -- but it fails in the long term -- realize headline was an exaggeration meant to sell me a paper, stop buying papers.

Of course, the same is true for most (if not all) online media outlets. News editors all seem to think that what we need is a little shazam in our news headlines and truth be damned.

It's like every news media source these days is just the editorial section of a real newspaper, but we can't find the real newspaper. We can't find the section where a real journalist pounds the streets to interview both sides and get to the bottom of a matter.

Some of you seem confused. The invasion of Afghanistan wasn't to eradicate Sharia law. It's not our business or even within our capability to turn their medieval court system into something modern. That's a cultural problem and we can't fix that. If Canada sent 50,000 more troops, that much would still be broken.

What we can do is keep the Taliban from coming back. The Taliban were even worse -- they would enforce the strictest interpretations of Islamic law, including making sure no women went to school and any idols got blown up (especially large, historical landmarks built by people from another religion).

The wars being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan are really wars of tenacity. Whichever side gives up first loses. Neither side can afford to lose. If we lose, terrorism has a new special place to flourish. If they lose, concepts like Sharia law and strapping bombs to children will fade away as their cause loses support.

Worse. In 1906 you could create a book with pictures of different ethnicities with only the intention of showing a reader some of the diversity of the world. In 2008, someone would call it a collection of half-assed, confused, racist, sexist depictions/descriptions of "race types". And they'd use quotations to show that they don't agree with the term "race types". In 1906, some people were indeed racist. In 2008, we just accuse each other of being racist with the slightest provocation because that's how we let everyone know that we're enlightened.

It's a funny old world.

I'm not sure which is more artistic, these days: the images or the language used to describe them.

Where I would say, "It is a picture of a potato", a proper art publicist would say, "It is a vibrant expression of everyday life culminated in the dark undertones and earthiness of an enthusiastically unwavering, yet convincing image of bygone days, fairytales and dreams".

I agree with Patrick at post 16 and I like his phrasing: "authentic clumsy use of quotation marks, like you might well get from a military functionary who's been assigned the job of tagging hundreds of evidentiary artifacts after a major disaster".

It is lame, but lame in a because-it-really-would-be-this-lame sort of way. It would be cooler if it had said "The Killing Fields" but really, it takes a science fiction writer to name something "The Killing Fields". A bored government worker would call it, "Central Park" with quotations to help state the obvious, which is that it's not really "Central Park" anymore but he didn't have anything else to call it.

To me, little jolts of unconventional realism are what brings a show to life for me. The typical sci-fi conventions end up annoying me:
* Lasers that go "pew pew"
* Space ships that experience apparent friction when turning
* Main characters that are all awesome
* Background characters that are all worthless morons
* (etc)

I love to see these conventions broken. Firefly had no noise in space. Awesome. Battlestar Galactica had fighters that could fly along one vector and turn and shoot in another direction without executing an airplane type turn. Heroes season 1 brings forward a lot of main characters who are really pretty lame, but realistically so.

I'm trying to think of a show that didn't have lame background characters, but I always thought there should be one. Like why do stormtroopers have to all be so incredibly inept? Why is everyone on the Starship Enterprise totally, utterly worthless except for the bridge crew? Maybe writers call it "maintaining focus" but I often call it "breaking immersion". I get more immersed when sci-fi gets more real.

This is what's wrong with America today: really bad news reporting that leaves viewers with the wrong impression of events. The pen is mightier than the taser and the reporters are even more careless than the police are.

Actually, Scuba, that's not a bad analogy.

When a restaurant says "free refills", they don't intend you to bring in an empty 50 gallon tank and wheel out a large supply of their soda. "Free refills" is an offer made in good faith and their infrastructure assumes you won't completely abuse it.

Internet service providers do the same thing. You have all the bandwidth that you could reasonably want for a flat rate but if you bring in the proverbial 50 gallon tank and attempt to use ALL of your bandwidth for every minute of every hour of every day, you're abusing their system and their infrastructure won't be able to sustain too many people doing that.

So they put limits on it, just like many restaurants would balk at their own "free refills" policy if you expectantly brought out the 50 gallon drum.

Or in other words...

This is why we can't have nice things.

Comcast's only real fault in my eyes is in not being up-front about what they're doing and not offering an alternative pay package for people who want to run file servers from home.

I have Comcast here. My download speed for torrents is ridiculously high but my uploads are clearly being blocked. I can *get* all the torrents I want but I can't *share* them. Every upload connection seems to break before it accomplishes anything.

I'd love to hear what prompted them to do it. Were bittorrent uploads really taking up that much bandwidth or was this a pre-emptive strike?

They should just offer a "premium server" package for more money that frees up your upload bandwidth and removes these blocks. I would seriously consider buying into something like that just to run game or VOIP servers on my home computer. Currently I have to buy a separate service from another company if I want to do any kind of internet server because Comcast's upload restrictions prevent me from doing it at home and as far as I know they don't even offer a package for it. All of their upgraded internet packages are just more and more download speed but still a really narrow pipe for uploads.

Ah, I see what you meant with the wording now, David. I blame the AP. The way they worded it, it's impossible to tell if they meant that he sold the drugs last week, then went to the store and got busted or if all three things happened back to back, last week. AP news quality is so random.

I think SantasKnee was trying to say you got the wording wrong. Your entry says he bought the ticket, then sold the dope, which would imply that there's no way that drug money was used to buy the ticket. The actual article, however, says he sold the dope, then bought the ticket, which implies that drug money could have been used.

I think their logic is a little fuzzy here anyway but the order of events definitely impacts the story.

This reminds me of a recent episode with my new HD DVD player.

I finally went HD. I had only watched 1 HD movie on it and I put in the first disc of Heroes HD DVD.

I got a read error. My thoughts, in approximate order:
* I should have went Blu-Ray.
* This technology isn't well fleshed out.
* There's something wrong with this new, fancy-schmancy player.
* Maybe I need to plug it into the network, since the Heroes DVD has some kind of web features on it, which this player is supposed to support.

After doing some research on the web, I ejected the DVD, held it to my eyeball, beheld a smudge on the edge, wiped it off on my shirt, put it back in the drive and watched Heroes with no further problems whatsoever.

.

Lesson learned:
Don't get so caught up in the hype and the politics and the panic of a thing that we jump to the political conspiracy theory right away, forgetting to check for the little, simple, common, basic problems first...

You want my real answer? Here it is.

My guess: Israel foresees a time when they're going to have to shut down Iran's nuclear weapons program. And it is a nuclear weapons program. You think Iran wants a nuclear reactor for energy? Iran who is sitting on top of the world's richest supplies of oil and natural gas? For a tenth of the cost and trouble of a nuclear reactor, Iran could improve their oil and gas infrastructure and wouldn't need nuclear reactors.

They're going for nuclear weapons, which Israel will never let them have. So when Israel destroys that reactor and associated facilities, Iran will fire everything they have at Israel in retaliation because if they don't, there will be civil war as the government will be seen as impotent. Israel can't afford to fight Iran head to head and can't just sit back and get bombarded, so a comprehensive missile shield is their best bet: they destroy Iran's reactor, they hide behind their missile shield until Iran runs out of missiles, problem solved. Iran can no sooner invade Israel than Israel can invade Iran, so there will be a lot of long range attacks and saber rattling and in the end, Iran will have no reactor and Israel will be no worse for wear.

There is only one condition under which Israel can use a nuclear weapon, and that's if their very existence is threatened.

This shield will, therefore, prevent a nuclear war because with it, Israel will not be threatened by a bombardment and there will be no need to use nukes in a fight against Iran.

Also note that this shield isn't "Skynet". If you read up on it some more you'll see that it's a system for integrating anti-missile batteries together so that someone somewhere can flip a switch and have all of the available anti-missile systems in the country coordinate to acquire and shoot down incoming missiles as rapidly as possible in ways that separate manned missile crews can't handle. There's no time for missile battery to tell missile batteries B through Z which of the 5000 incoming targets they are going to acquire. It needs a system that doesn't currently exist.

You can say what you will about Israelis, but don't think they're stupid or foolish or hacking out unnecessary software programs to tie into weapon systems for the hell of it. They endure more rocket attacks per year than the average American endures trips to the gas station. Mass rocket attacks are the weapons of choice for the enemies and if Iran decides to stop operating through proxies and attack directly, Israel knows exactly how many missiles to expect. If an automated, linked system is what they say they need, it's probably because they do.

The best hope for the middle east right now is a revolution in Iran, which is possible. The Iranian people aren't the problem -- the Iranian government is. Iranians are freezing on top of the richest oil fields in the world because the Iranian president is more concerned with nuclear weapons and saber rattling than he is about the welfare of his people.

Takuan, is there something wrong with your knee?

I'm an Amazon fanboi. Totally. I had never bought music online until Amazon offered it and I've had no issues with it (prior to that I bought music on CD...through Amazon). They play fine, the information shows up, burning them to CD and sticking it in my 3 year old car also works. Sounds to me like the original poster just managed to find a couple of poorly written software applications that get confused by newer tag formats. I don't see how Amazon is doing anything less than a Good Thing. Good for them, good for me, good for the music industry.

Now if you'll pardon me, I need to make a trip to the recycler to drop off all these stacked up Amazon boxes...

Are there enough gamers out there to make these things marketable? I assume the target audience is "adult gamers", since I doubt anyone would buy them for their kids, and "serious adult gamers with disposable income" at that. So we've basically eliminated children, most college kids and casual players. How many people does that leave to buy these pills?

Hmmm, now that I think about it tho, maybe they are very marketable in Europe and Asia, where internet cafes are popular. I could see them flying off the shelves there if they really do help with alertness. The internet cafe gamers I've known were always of the "binge" variety. They didn't head out to the cafe for anything less than 5 hours at a time if they could help it.

You shouldn't let those people get to you, Cory. They're just expressing their opinion. I'm sure someone out there doesn't like the Sistene Chapel or Mozart's 5th Symphony, too. There's just no accounting for taste! When you invite the public to give comments, you're going to get the bad with the good.

For myself, I love Rothwell's works, although I would have described them as more generally "gothic", maybe even a bit "Cthulhuean". It's art with a glorius twist that would have made Lovecraft proud. It's well worth thumbing through his online listings. If the first couple posters got turned off just because of the "steampunk" label, they should click the link and have a look at what's there. They can always apply a different label if they want!