Of course NASA isn't tracking UFOs -- that's because they can't be tracked. Duh. If UFOs were real and NASA were hiding them, that's exactly what they would say!

Is your scan, displayed on my laptop, a print? Thanks a lot, BoingBoing!

On the one hand, I roll my eyes at the notion that this had any noticeable harmful effect on either the Internet or the world.

On the other, people do link in to BB, and the phenomenon of link rot is an irritating one. I can see why someone who'd linked in would be taken aback.

To a certain extent, I'd like to point out that link rot exists even at sites other than BoingBoing, and that if someone thinks a particular page should have more than momentary relevance they should take care of their own backups instead of expecting you to be an immutable resource for ever and ever amen.

But -- if you choose to do so -- then deletions at a later date might better be implemented as redirect pages to a post noting and explaining the deletion. Then nobody has those nasty 404s that threaten our civilization so direly, and you've been all open about your editorial decisions (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean in your context) and everybody will hopefully be less unhappy about the situation.

But I'm still rolling my eyes at the amount of furor this caused. It cost me a perfectly good three days, too. I'm an idiot.

So wait, Teresa -- doing the math from your dandy list, that means that the fucktards at TSA have put 300,000 new names on the list since March?

Jesus, I wish I got paid for doing that little thinking. Classic scam, if you ask me. Make Money Fast with Terrorism!

Kulervo #37 - there's been no constructive help because there is no help. Literally. This may be the first time you've encountered this, but the problem is years old, and is simple: the list is a secret. The law governing the list is secret. The policy of the airlines is secret.

There is no mechanism to take names off. The TSA improbably maintains that all those names need to be on there because they're terrorists.

So we have largely ignored you because there's no answer, not if you still consider America to be government for the people and by the people. Because this list shows it's not. Sorry to disappoint you. Consider writing your Congressman, if you don't mind getting put on the list.

StupidPhoneBook #15, I live in Puerto Rico. Please tell me how I can travel without using planes, and I might grant you the status of non-moron. Otherwise, bub, you're disemvowelled and stupid.

Do they have Coca-Cola? I like Coca-Cola.

This video truly is a wonderful thing!

AARRGGHGHGH. This whole thing has been raising my blood pressure all weekend. The world is full of crap and all you trolls can worry about is whether Boing fricking Boing is on the side of censorship evil? Hypocritical?

Jesus Mary God save us from you morons. I know calling a spade a spade is throwing gasoline on this fire, and Teresa, feel free to disemvowel or delete if I'm being too harsh here, but this has gone just too far. Arrogant know-nothings hate BoingBoing for being more successful than they are, then they spill over onto Making Light, and they probably even vote. Or worse! They probably don't vote! And are holier-than-thou about being above that system!

I really don't suffer fools gladly -- so please! Shut the fuck up! All of you!

Jeez Louise, I just hate these people, and it's not easy to provoke me to that kind of antipathy. I even try to understand Donald Rumsfeld. (I do draw the line at Cheney.)

Why don't you all take all that righteous outrage energy and do something with it that won't make the world worse? Go, I dunno, dance energetically with Matt Harding or something. And get the fuck off BoingBoing's back! They owe you nothing -- they give you endless entertainment for free and you repay them with enough hatred -- not just on this issue, but on every little fricking thing that comes down the pike -- that it has to make them wonder why in hell they do it. Seriously. Grow the fuck up.

In fact, (tobacco) cigarette smoking is beneficial to sufferers of ulcerative colitis -- because nicotine really is anti-inflammatory.

Oh, that is so utterly charming. Eastern Europe had fantastic children's animation. (The Czech stuff in particular is absolutely wonderful.)

With amici like these, who needs enemies?

Oh, Talia -- it's Hungary. That venison was eaten. (Deliciously.)

I dragged the kids there once -- my wife said, "Why in the world would you go to the Agricultural Museum?" It was fantastic.

It's also in the Városliget park, where they have Children's Day festivals. And next to where they have ice skating, behind Hero's Square with the statues and the monument, where ...

I keep forgetting why we left Budapest again. Oh yeah -- the air pollution. Dirtiest damn city in Europe (literally), and that's saying something.

Jnoring, I call shenanigans! You say:

Putting it another way, there is a difference in saying "this is fact" and "I hold the view/belief this is reality." These are not equivalent statements when it comes to rational, scientific discourse.

Torquemadans generally hold the first, and those who believe in the scientific method and rational discourse hold on to the second.

I am almost positive that what you really meant to say was:

Putting it another way, I believe there is a difference in saying "this is fact" and "I hold the view/belief this is reality." I do not believe that these are equivalent statements when it comes to rational, scientific discourse.

I believe and assert that Torquemadans generally hold the first, and I believe that those who believe in the scientific method and rational discourse believe that they hold on to the second.

Because you're all about science and logical consistency, unlike Cory and Malkin and all those Torquemadans. Right? Why do you still have vowels, again?

The EULA on their feed site (I am cringing with the sheer irony of that phrase) specifically forbids you from rewriting any content thereon. And by reading it, you agree!

If the end result of the RIAA is to abolish corporate personhood, then I'm starting to feel a lot more positive about the RIAA...

I doubt very much they will go after small bloggers who make a few dollars from AdSense.

Which would be a fine and reasonable position to take, were it not for the fact that this is, in fact, precisely what The AP is doing.

People forget that the company that opened up the PC architecture was IBM. When was the last time anyone saw an IBM-manufactured PC? Do you think that move worked out for them?

In the short term? Yes, it did. They didn't keep the advantage because of other mistakes they were making at the time, but srsly, that was a major and serious mistake Apple made at the time.

It may, however, be the case that Jobs is not a moron; I'll go as far as admitting he's an idiot savant.

What does it say about me that the article I felt most positive about was the Serenity sequel?

This closed crap is why the original Macintosh lost the market to IBM in the first place. That $1000 bar to software development meant there was never any serious third-party software on what was clearly the better machine. So it was a useless paperweight -- a pretty, useless paperweight, but useless nonetheless.

Jobs is a moron.

Come on, anybody over the age of 30 who watched Peanuts specials on CBS knows what a Zamboni is. Snoopy doted on the Zamboni.

Gawrsh. I guess coming from Indiana is finally useful for something.

When I first saw this headline, I wondered why a Wisconsin funeral home would have photos from a squirrel taxidermy diorama -- it seemed a rather tasteless selection for artwork in a funeral home!

Wow, that would be great if Amazon shipped to Puerto Rico. But ... they don't. Bastards.

@21 - yeah, if we still had journalists, the media might actually ask about issues. Instead, we just have gossip columnists -- but hey, it sells fish wrappers.

Wow. Just ... wow.

Well said, Xopher.

Noen, I detect a certain sense of satisfaction on your part to "realize" that there is an elite in the world to which you will never belong, but which fortunately also excludes all the other people you might meet. This seems very similar to the authoritarian need to foist authority on those who don't want it -- I suspect it's identical, actually.

What are your feelings regarding police brutality? Inquiring minds want to know.

Dead Air is an appropriate name. Are you intentionally trolling? My kids drank putridly sour milk once and never noticed a thing -- I nearly passed out when I happened to get a whiff. My son (about 5 at the time) did admit afterwards that it seemed more like yoghurt, but ... notice the alcohol when it's intentionally masked under corn syrup? Not a chance. You don't have kids, do you, he said with no perceptible question mark.

Hey! I got the "text is wrong" error! And here I thought it was a myth.

What I was trying to say was something like this (and if this is imperfect, it is solely because the system erased my original, perfect reply.)

Effacing the distinction between thought and act? I'm sorry, I'm as anti-Pentagon as anybody (ask anybody) but even I find this to be balderdash of the purest kind. I can't believe such an interface would kill someone if I simply harbor violent thoughts -- and if it is, then I still made the choice to enable the interface. Thus there is still a clear intent, and a clear act, of violence.

This guy is just media whoring.

@9 - if an innovation is small, so that competitive advantage is lost because competitors can duplicate the technology quickly, then the investment was likewise small -- thus society should not be prevented from reinventing such an obvious thing.

But if investment in ideas is required, then clearly those ideas are not trivial or obvious, so competitors would likewise need to invest substantial sums in order to reinvent them.

I don't pretend to know the answer to the best possible balance of monopoly and free market, but I do know that the current system is not it. Patents were not meant to be bludgeons ensuring that the company with the best-paid lawyers got to keep all the money.

Nobody's going to take Moon down. He owns the Washington Times, for cryin' out loud! Back in the 80's in Indiana, all the rednecks were askeered of Moonies -- but you never hear that any more. Nobody talks about Sun Myung Moon nowadays, because he's got lots of money, and it all votes Republican. Thus he must be our kind of folks.

This thought isn't fully formed, but doesn't the SIGMA group (wacky people with a certain uniformity in their political views advising the government on security threats) sound kinda like Germany's predilection for hiring similar mystics in the late 30's?

I've got to get more sleep; that one made a shiver go down my spine.

I find it odd how many people seem to be taking Calpernia's video personally. I took it as hilarious anger-catharsis, and although I am also very curious about these questions, I knew that she wasn't calling me a dumbass, because I didn't ask her said questions. If, by some weird chance, I were to meet Calpernia out of the blue, and out of some further weird chance I were to discover that she was transgendered, then I can only imagine that these questions would still not be the first things I'd consider germane conversation. Let's face it -- if that's your first reaction to Calpernia, you are a dumbass.

Mikesum1, to take a disemvowelled example from this thread, appears to be a little confused on whether he himself is being addressed as a dumbass. To which I can only think, if Mikesum1 considers that shoe to fit, perhaps it's because he is a dumbass. I just can't put it any plainer than that.

This video rules. It's the condescending tone that makes it rule, and anybody getting a little hot under the collar -- I submit -- is only reacting to the somewhat scary topic of transgendering, and to the even scarier specter of somebody getting good and righteously pissed in public. Cowards.

Xopher, I wasn't aware that "Xopher" could be pronounced. .... How do you pronounce it? "Gzofer"? "Zofer"? "Eksofer"?

@28: Mm. Bacon.

It should also be noted that the police threatened Myers with arrest if he didn't leave immediately -- he had the audacity to stand around talking with his family before the movie started.

That kind of stuff just pisses me off.

Also, crimeny - I beat Cory to the punch blogging this, for once, but I misspelled Myers' name. That's what I get for trying to blog in the wee hours.

A lot of Americans don't know you can use ATMs anywhere. Especially those from Indianapolis. Hoosiers are charmingly naive when it comes to travel.

Indiana is the state, after all, where you cannot change your Euros back to dollars after traveling. None of the banks know what to do with it. You can either go to the only exchange booth in the entire state (at the airport in Indy) or you can mail your Euros to American Express. No joke. I drove an hour and a half to the damn airport from Bloomington.

FWIW, the dollar's not too volatile today so far, hanging around .63 Euros.

Mark, that's just plain wrong. I go to Europe pretty often. I've never even once been checked leaving. Not once.

But what burns me about this is DHS trying to say MY GOD THIS IS SO IMPORTANT but we're not going to pay for it. But please take us seriously anyway.

Jerks.

By the way, Joddehaa -- global travel departures are up 28% in 2007 over 2000, but in the US, arrivals are down 11%. (DTMB)
All those people are choosing to go other places -- and yeah, the dollar being in the toilet is the only saving grace. The Commerce Department, of course, says "recordbreaking year!" because our 11% fewer travelers still spent more dollars than last year, but they don't bother with the rest of the story. Typical.

Well, given that all the organelles in your cells (like your mitochondria) are effectively symbiotic bacteria, too, the notion that we're all walking bacterial mats isn't too freaky.

Can these starlings gather coins for peanuts? I'm just getting a sneaking suspicion we're engineering our own successor species here...

I, for one, salute our new avian overlords.

Sooo ... as a society, we're training suicide bombers. That makes me feel much happier this morning.

The baby NEVER stops being cute. Mine are 13 and 8.

Actually, "Überwachenden" just means "people monitoring". "Überwache" may have that idiomatic meaning. If so, I've never heard it, but since most of my work is technical translation, I don't get a lot of idiom.

But the text really just mean, "the government (or other people monitoring)". Less poetic, I suppose.

That cop deserves a medal! Artists should learn that remote-control boxes are just disrespectful of society -- in fact, the cop should have threatened the artist's life! (And would have, too, if he'd only been 14.)

@75 TonyB: There are people here, apparently, who also think that policemen should have carte blanche because they "protect us" from ... uh ... skinny 14-year-olds with iPods. Or something.

It's sad.

So to recap the comments of the pro-authoritarians here in the discussion:

@35 Mbirdsong: (with added snideness) says "The United States Of America is not, nor has ever been, A Democracy. We are a Representative Republic. We are not governed by Mob Rule, We are governed by Rule Of Law." Precisely. Which is why our police should obey it. You think mob rule (the policeman) should get a medal. Fine by me -- but you're the guy needs a civics lesson, pup.

@37 Malcomkass: "It's worse in Chile." Yes. I'd rather it didn't get that bad. You, on the other hand, seem vested in sticking your fingers in your ears and going la-la-la. "Jeez."

@48 Jeff: "someone will always have power over you, so figure out who and act properly around them" - please, sir, may I have another?

I frankly don't understand people who can read our founding documents, then think it's great that our cops beat people up for no reason but their own low-cost psychotherapy. The great thing about America is, of course, that all three of you have the right to say these things. But you're still freaking wrong.

Sure, Mbirdsong -- the cop should be given a medal for trying to make America more authoritarian. Good on you, except for the whole "in America" part. Maybe you'd be happier someplace in the world where authority has the legal right to act like that. Someplace under shari'a law, perhaps.

Meanwhile, back in democracy, the cop's getting a vacation with pay while the city hopes everybody'll stop paying attention before they reinstate him with a warning. Maybe you think that's peachy. I think it's pathetic.

If the kids were breaking the law, there are legal means to handle it. Give them a citation, make them go to court and deal with that. Good civics lesson. Instead, the only lesson is you'd better not piss on a strong man's turf.

That's not America.

Well personally I find Palindromic's comment tediously derivative of great jaded postings of the past.

Not only have I found my new favorite thing on the Internet, I have now found my new favorite comment on the Internet.

@16 - brilliant!

Takuan has it right? I had assumed Takuan was joking. Because I'm not seeing a whole lot of Harleys washing out on crosswalks, so I fail to see the inherent danger in paint.

Of course, after 9/11 everything's different. Americans are slaves.

I can't decide whether that's authoritarian overreach or not -- but good for him for taking matters into his own hands, and I hope he enjoys his fifteen minutes.

Also, I was born in Muncie, which the Smithsonian Magazine once used as an illustrative example of the word "armpit", as in "Muncie is the armpit of Indiana." Which is demonstrably unfair, as that's Gary. My English teacher in high school (who actually took the Smithsonian Magazine, and lives in Muncie) was outraged. Ha.

I'm finding it unreasonably funny that the tag on this is "happy mutants".

I think a baby mario must be a mariino.

Yum - bottled Coke with sucrose, as God intended!

I'm just recoiling at the notion of the suction cups -- when they pop off, somebody's getting a lap full of sugary Coke. Undoubtedly why they stopped using that in the first place...

Oops: Insomma, not Insomnia. Freudian slip there.

Insomnia, here at home I pay, what, 25 cents per kWh? My laptop draws 19 V at 3.42 A (says so on the label) = 65 W. That's, humm, 0.07 kW. I'd be willing to pay a 300% markup, because God knows airports are struggling for their very existence, right? I give the beggar on the corner a quarter, too, when he asks.

So an hour of laptop power should cost me 7 cents. Ah, hell, it is charity to give the airport money, so let's just call it a quarter for them, too.

I'm happy to hear that the Einstein quote is bogus, because it always rankled that Einstein should be quoted all the time about fricking ecology. Now I know it was just some poseur trying to make a quote sound authoritative without doing the work to find a real quote.

Well, this has those schmucks in New York beat all hollow. Now whenever anybody does a paper airplane bit on YouTube, the Japanese can say, "Shyeeah, but were you still in the atmosphere?"

Also, for the record, #5 Idle Tuesday is a moron. Thank you, that will be all.

Who in their right mind buys this false ripe produce at places like Walmart?

Um... me? (Gimme a break, Walmart's one of the better importers of produce here in Puerto Rico.)

I don't see the point in hiding online -- the only time I've worried about it was while doing serious antispamming, and then only one frisson and one weird phone call.

But then I suppose Googling on "Michael Roberts" isn't going to get you much closer to me anyway, ha. And the address you find is wrong. Nowadays I don't even worry about picking fights online with rednecks, because it's really hard to load up the pickup and drive to Puerto Rico to set fire to my house. Which is concrete, anyway.

For a while I did obsess a little about my kids giving out personal info, it's true. Lately I don't worry too much about that, either. There are plenty of other kids online to steal.

Ha, I second Patrick (and was going to, even before I saw it was Patrick who said it.) I'm a Quaker, and one of the first times I really thought about non-violence was as I was learning karate. I'll leave further belaboring of the parallel to the reader.

If I didn't live in Indiana, I might be sure it was satire.

Trust me on this.

At this point, the humor has sort of taken on a life of its own. Thank God I read the Cliff Notes before searing it into my hypothalamus for life.

It's clear to me that Bush should either stay in the damned White House and not come out, or go someplace where there is already plenty of security, like the Green Zone in Baghdad, and stay there. This needless duplication of security effort costs money, after all -- Republicans need to learn that money doesn't grow on their grandkids' trees.

What? What? No "Vinge isn't actually very brilliant" trolling? Is this still BoingBoing?

For the record, I love Vernor Vinge's work, all of it.

#49 -- it does make sense; if somebody really is neglecting the use of land, the law says it can be put to beneficial use. I wish to God the same applied to intellectual "property".

I can't express how enthusiastic I am about the legal argumentation on this thread. It's like knowing something about the law without actually having to! I love the Internet.

I make my money translating, so I type all day, every day, between 5000 and 10,000 words. (Sometimes I write fiction to take a break -- I'm currently 26,000 words into a story I started on the 4th.) That's an environment where a slight increse in efficiency can make a big difference, so I've occasionally flirted with the idea of switching to Dvorak.

But I just don't think I can afford to -- if it screws up my QWERTY typing during retraining, it would kill my schedule.

And yeah, I'd never be able to type a password again; they're all stored in my motor cortex.

That's lovely.

TUS, so you're saying that peer review is an unnecessary part of actual science?

It took the stripper *how long* to realize maybe her employer had made a mistake?

Wow. Great story!

Unusual Suspect @16, you misunderstand -- the MLB clearly states that the license will exist forever, and it does. It says nothing about your technical ability to make the license actually display the content.

/snark

Wait -- you got this link from Sterling's Wired blog? How crass is that, to post about your work on your own blog? What is this world coming to?

That was utterly charming!

Oh, that's what happened -- I was anonymous without realizing it. Do the cookies expire or something?

I was kind of looking forward to seeing how the other half lives, you know, Sockpuppet-Americans. The vocal minority.

Also: Automatt is defending Scott, who also trolls at Slacktivist? But we can't tell if Scott is Yeago or Nutkin -- aha, because Scott, Yeago, Nutkin, and Automatt are all the same guy (which explains how he knows himself at work)! Is Nonesuch also this guy?

Is there a libretto available, perhaps for a nominal fee?

Wait, didn't I post here yesterday? I'm not a sockpuppet! At least, I don't think I'm a sockpuppet, although I was accused of it once in the olden days of spam fighting.

I'm so confused!

You have to know the right people, Teflon. That's how everything works in the Third World.

Mrfitz, a lot of America started out thinking pleasure is morally wrong. The Puritans didn't get their name from their weekly orgies, man! And they specifically came to an "empty" continent (except for natives, who didn't count) in order to forge a new and pristine way of life away from the sinful cesspool of Europe.

Yes, because we know the government always tells the truth when it comes to government malfeasance.

What I find extremely astounding is that not only was the radio not his -- it wasn't even in his room. Turns out the hotel security staff had lied to the FBI about which room it was in, because Higazy was Arab-looking.

What really got people thinking was when the pilot who'd stayed a floor below Higazy came in asking for the radio he'd left in the hotel...

And this is the same FBI which had specifically directed their Minneapolis office to avoid following up on an investigation of a Saudi citizen who -- oops -- actually was involved in the 9/11 incident. Because we didn't want to tick Saudi Arabia off (Egypt isn't as important to our strategic requirements, and the Bush family doesn't have business interests there.)

Oh, and by the way, as somebody with large debt in dollars and mostly paid in Euros, I'm not at all rooting for the dollar collapse, no, no, not at all. That would be ... mean.

Well -- "Some emerging economies that have relied on external financing to fund large current account deficits could be tipped into crisis by a combination of reduced demand for their exports and tighter financial market conditions," the IMF chief said.

So at least the American economy won't be tipped into crisis or anything. Whew!

I have to say that this sounds incredibly cool. It's like 419 baiting, but with pizazz! Or pizzas... No, no, I'm pretty sure I mean pizazz.

Twenty years ago, the idea you'd need government permission to fly would have been ridiculous. Do you care to place bets on the same applying to cross state lines (except that it's (currently) unconstitutional to restrict interstate commerce)?

Three weeks ago, the idea you'd need ID to visit a federal park would have seemed ridiculous. Come to think of it -- it still is.

There's a lot of incompetent people making a lot of money on this crap.

Also, I take exception to it being ridiculous to compare this with fascism (or even with facism). You need to detect fascism early if you want to get out before the borders close.

Um, David, I believe JJasper is in China. $20 for a shirt is not exploitation in China, it's reasonable exchange.

About ten years ago, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a "Chinese market" in Budapest that we used to frequent. It was literally Chinese in the sense that it was built of shipping containers and sold stuff straight off the rail lines or barges or whatever the hell transport modality got stuff there, and all the sellers were Chinese. And the food stall vendors were, like Vietnamese, sold you stuff that would take the roof of your mouth off.

That stuff was dirt cheap -- I got a nice jacket there with a removable faux-fur lining, probably paid about $10 or $20 at the time (I don't remember) and wore it for years. The lining's zipper self-destructed in about a month, but the rest of the jacket lasted well.

Did I oppress a suffering people by buying a jacket there? Should I have paid much more in the States for a jacket still made in China? I'm pretty sure by buying from a Chinese distributor, at least as much of the money went to the people who made the jacket.

In this instance, I'm on the side of capitalism -- and I think it's crucial to be able to distinguish between capitalism (buying from a vendor) and corporate capitalism (buying from a Nike dealership, say). In the former, the market works, mostly; in the latter, power overwhelms actual market forces, and distortions like advertising and this luxury effect kick in. There is waste, and most of that waste is in the form of paying rich people for their connections instead of paying productive people for their work.

Wow. Preferring capitalism really makes me sound like a Commie these days, doesn't it?

80% of something twice the size of Texas is an awful lot of petroleum byproducts. Somebody's going to make some serious money out there someday.

"[I]f you are facing the ocean and are stymied on how to proceed, just turn right or left, and rediscover that there is no better turf for walking than a beach."

Wow! Great writing!

You're meant to be confused on the "commercial property" -- it's a convenient part of the official bluster. And it's doubtlessly the first more or less fitting point of dubious law that a frantic administrator could find.

But even if it's true that this is law -- why should people traveling on business between Canada and the United States be restricted to certain crossings, apparently defined in secret as convenience dictates? It's bad for business -- but it's primarily bad for small business, and I think therein lies one of the key points of this little vignette.

But what do I know? I'm just a conspiracy theorist who's naive enough to enjoy Boing Boing, certainly not one of these worldly commentators who are smart enough to avoid being taken in by baseless rumors that, say, our government isn't looking out for the best interests of every least person in these United States. Perish the very thought!

What I don't understand is why conservatives suddenly believe in the ability of government to get things right. Why defend Customs of all people? Have you ever traveled?

Clearly, they saw something scary -- in this case a hard drive, which everyone knows is the place all terrorists put their viruses to bring the Pentagon network down -- and they Acted Quickly. And then when it turned out they'd Acted Stupidly, they huffed and puffed and denied it all, and blamed it on the courier for having gotten the paperwork wrong.

It's beyond belief that calling a spade a spade -- or in this case, stupidity stupidity -- is suddenly a conspiracy theory that requires a followup from Boing Boing now that you fine folk have "debunked" it (meaning that you found official denial of government incompetence).

I have never understood the desire of people to come to Boing Boing, read something they don't like, then demand that Boing Boing change it to suit them. It's beyond weird to me. I guess you envy their access to an audience. Could it be that they have the traffic because they have something of interest to say beyond "Our leaders have again reassured us that they know best"?

Get lives.

As you may know, a television picture is made up of a series of colored dots called pixels, which you can inspect by getting really close to the screen. We do not permit you to inspect the precise layout of these pixels, as we consider that layout to be our intellectual property. You are therefore not authorized to approach your television screen while our content is displayed on it.

Wow. I just want to go on record as having said, "Wow." I like this century, even with the bitter pills we're having to swallow.

Also: I, too, saw the Muppet. Weird.

I particularly liked this:

Enter the ANYWHERE IS POSSIBLE sweepstakes!
US residents only.

Don't people's heads just explode from that kind of thing?

If only they had leaked it to somebody who gave a shit about fighting terrorism -- instead, they were foolish enough to give it to senior administration officials.

Bour3@12: Cell phones now feel they can't use the Internet? I can't understand your crazy moon language.

Lots of people presumably want to kill me, just like I could name a few people I wouldn't mind seeing pushing up a few daisies, but dude, in addition to motive, they pretty much need opportunity. Buying into the Bush administration's narrative because people want to kill meee omzg is just pathetic. Grow up. If you don't like realism and prefer your little romantic frissons, stick to places where you won't feel challenged. In the meantime, sane people would really like to see a little competence in Washington these days. And you're not helping.

Rarely is the question asked, is our terrorist groups still hid?

Hey, wow, Clif, are you from, say, Centerville? My Mom lives in Richmond and I grew up on a farm out towards Losantville. Very cool to see fellow Wayne Countiers online. .... Actually, this is the first time. Not like there are a whole lot of us.

I hear there aren't even any ninjas in it.

Charlie -- yeah, but you'll screw up all the quote marks. So you say there's typo improvement, but do you mean it.

Also: are there any ninjas in this book? I don't understand why they call you a writer of ninja fiction.

Maybe the ninjas are just always invisible. Being ninjas.

VIK: A lot of the acidophilus in commercial yoghurt doesn't make it down to the gut, but brew your own and there are lots, lots more bugs in it.

The commercial probiotic preparation VSL #3 has been shown to be as effective as steroids in fighting IBD (e.g. Crohn's Disease) -- we use it as a yoghurt starter. The resulting yoghurt is strong enough to blow your ears off, but it's not only a tasty treat with honey (especially still warm from the yoghurt maker), it also keeps our daughter healthy (she's got Crohn's.)

Oh sweet Jesus, I may not be able to take much more of this maggoty rot infesting the corpse of the Republic. Let's just call off the Enlightenment, roll back the Magna Carta -- write it all off as a bad experiment. Why even anticipate progress in the human condition? It's just bad for business anyway.

Speaking of which, clearly I should also be in the security theater snake oil and nostrum business. There's obviously plenty of easy money to go around.

The TSA hasn't (yet) shut down the entire downtown of a city while they investigated a Lite-Brite. In fact -- gee -- nobody but Boston has.

But at least we all learned a lot about 70's hair.

#22 -- they will be, soon. They have a $15 billion contract for drug and immigration enforcement. Feel safer yet?

But it's OK. The free market will ensure that they won't kill anybody you care about. It's not like the government, which is forced by lawmakers to shoot people in the street on a random basis.

This discussion, being off the front page, is probably dead, but I like your answer, Phasor3000. I disagree with your conclusions, but now you're actually speaking to the root situation. Your view is that in order to avoid further degradation of the social situation, people should refrain from doing "bad" things. Sure. They should. I agree. We still disagree on which things are "bad", but we have found common ground.

As to your point that copyright existed long before the downloading era -- yes. It did. In much, much more restricted scope. And why do they call copyright extension bills the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act"? Because bad actors want to maintain a death grip on imaginary "properties" which guarantee them rent money, for free, forever. Case in point: Disney doesn't pay royalties on the intellectual properties they bowdlerize with every one of their movies, because they're rifling through our common heritage. But if your daycare wants to paint Pocahontas or the Little Mermaid on their wall, they'd better not come to the lawyers' attention.

But your larger point is one I disagree with intensely, and that is the notion that legal rights define morality. I simply do not believe that it is wrong to violate the legal rights of a company per se. I do agree that the formal law usually matches pretty well with morality -- that's what it's for, after all -- but particularly in the last couple of decades, it's much more likely to reflect rent-seeking behavior on the part of corporations.

And that is the situation I heartily commend Cory for attempting to change. I don't like your attacks on it, because I think they're fundamentally wrong-headed. And I most certainly don't like the prissy tone you adopt.

But all that said, I am quite favorably impressed by your last reply. That's arguing to the substance instead of trying to use silly rhetorical feints. Good show.

Phasor3000, Cory gave you three answers -- they were all "no". My answer is also "no". It is not inherently wrong, as you clearly believe, to download an MP3 track from a CD for which you don't have a license. It just isn't.

As you grow older, you will learn that in many situations in life, there are no clearcut answers. This is one of those situations -- it's only one of a great number of situations where there is no inherent wrong.

I also take as somewhat puerile the assertion that a philosophical question can be "simple". That's pretty stupid -- if it's a simple question, why are we debating it?

As far as the larger situation is concerned -- from the much maturer standpoint of what would be the maximum benefit of all concerned, it's clear to me that Cory's right: the RIAA is being stupid and short-sighted. And in a normal situation, nobody would care; if an industry association wants to commit suicide, fine, that's their right.

But in this particular situation, the RIAA and other entertainment associations pose a unique threat to society: they have a great deal of money, and they have absolutely no moral qualms whatsoever against perverting American and world democracy, or against barratry.

My simple question to you would be this: "Is it wrong to buy legislation to protect a failing business model?" Sure, two wrongs don't make a right -- but in this case, in my view and in the view of many, there is only one wrong.

Incidentally, since you're so focused on the plight of the poor entertainment industry, who simply can't make ends meet due to all this rampant wrongness in today's society -- what do you do for a living? Do you produce creative works of any nature, like Cory? Or do you just blow smoke out your ass on a regular basis?

And I mean that in the nicest possible way, of course.

Zyklon, Ted Stevens won't be in charge, because he's (unsurprisingly) fallen deep into a little problem with the FBI, and bribes turn out to have built his house. He's going to be history, unfortunately for the future of the funny Internet phrases market.

Cantstopthesignal, it is naive to believe that Tor won't be made illegal. Homeland Security will break down your door, carry off your computers and TV, shoot your dog, and leave you with a bruised kidney, for daring to presume you have a right to privacy. Only terrorists need privacy, after all. Everybody else will be happy with a tiered Internet (which, I might add, will include Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh in the lowest tier, but whose 2000 "advanced" sites will *not* include Eschaton, Digby, or anything outside the borders of the United States). That's where the Powers that Be want to go with tiered Internet, because it's the only way to make sure people are forced back to pre-Internet ways of communicating.

You *can* stop the signal. Real easily. Didn't you watch Serenity? They *killed* him, man. It was sheer luck and a displaced nerve center that allowed the signal not to be stopped in that one case, and in reality, the pundits would quickly have tamped down on that illegal broadcast anyway -- "Oh, I think there's no question, Dave, that that was a forgery, and not a very clever one either. The public isn't going to buy that line, and that's what everybody thinks." Besides, only a Reaver sympathizer would try to say there was a cause for them to become Reavers. Everybody knows that Reavers, like Terrorists, are simply evil embodied, and hate us for our freedom.

Can't stop the signal, my ass. I *wish* I could believe that, but rooting out fascism isn't going to be so simple as just waiting for the deus ex machina of the free market to take care of it.

Next, I predict this, somebody here is going to say I've poisoned the debate -- Godwinized it, in a sense -- by linking it to my moonbat liberalism. But what is, actually, fascism? The definition, I mean? Yes, it's that form of government in which big business is coopted as a means of state control. Controlling the signal *is* controlling the people. A tiered Internet *is* fascism, and will enable more fascism. And if you think it's not in the interests of AT&T and the other telcos to support an authoritarian government, well, I pity you good Germans. It's the nature of the corporate beast to keep the market as controlled and predictable as possible -- fascism *works*, if you're rich enough that you're in control of it.

And there is most definitely a reason that the Bush administration is now demanding legislation to hold the telcos retroactively harmless of any alleged assistance they may have provided in alleged illegal wiretapping, which certainly didn't occur, and certainly wasn't illegal if it did, and certainly wasn't directed against anybody but terrorists anyway, or people who might know terrorists, or people who we think might be able to spell "terrorist", or Kevin Bacon.

No, the telcos are behind this 100%. A tiered Internet just consolidates their power *and* locks their profits in. It's perfect, from their point of view. Bastards.

And conversely, after I went to Japan, I discovered that 10-yen coins work great as quarters in US vending machines!

Um, I mean, that's what I've been told. Of course, I would never cheat an honest vending machine distribution businessman like that. Now that I'm old.

Yeah. I was kind of interested until I hit that 16 grams per ton figure. Man. I'd rather stay here at home in Puerto Rico and extract iron from the beach sand. (Magnetite, actually. Very fun to take a nice little rare-earth magnet to the beach and sort the sand grains with it.)

Yes, @netsharc, the Soviet government was precisely this dumb and incompetent, as were the Nazis -- it's a side effect of authoritarianism to believe that if you clap hard enough, there will be fairies, or effective mind rays, or a way to know who posted Dangerous Ideas to the tubes.

Magic thinking. Prescientific. It's such a mistake to think competence has anything to do with it -- even imagining a competent authoritarian government requires the assumption that people do something because it works (not just because they want to) and don't do something else because it doesn't work (not just because they don't want to).

By subjecting an action to adjudication by reality (i.e. seeing if it works or not) you are submitting to another, higher authority. The true authoritarian leader has ... troubles with that.

You probably think I'm joking, and to a certain extent this is, of course, tongue-in-cheek. But deep down, it's not funny. It's real.

Burz and Phasor3000 are, of course, free to submit their patches to spec.

Cory, it was a damned chilling read. Excuse me while I go kill myself.

95% accuracy. Wow. That's pretty advanced technology, all right.

Of course, 70% percent of that is the guy who always writes about "Windoze suxx0r!!!!1!" and the other 25% percent is the guy who always writes "I CN HAS CHEEZBURGR?"

But it's very advanced technology -- we might never have found these people otherwise.

Cheney must have thought he didn't need his makeup if he stayed inside...

Ooh, Teresa, them's fightin' words! (Pass the popcorn!)

I would like to announce that Despammed.com now officially blocks all mail from quechup.com. I'm partying like it's 1999! (Literally.)

Hey, wait -- does the mail go out from your own account or through their server? That's something filterable. I'd like to put it into Despammed if it's that easy.

Aw. I feel unpopular now. I haven't gotten any Quechup invites.

On the Torrentspy thing -- apparently Torrentspy doesn't consider Puerto Rico part of the US, I can confirm from my undisclosed but southern location.

Interesting.

Jeez, these comments duplicate in microcosm those on Righi's own post. "Private property = exemption from the law" is my favorite. Remind me to shoot you dead next time you set foot on my property -- after all, you agreed to play by my rules by being on my property.

What? The law does apply even if I have legal title to my land? Well, hell, then STFU, moron!

Preemptively, before somebody here starts whining about this "idiot" or "douche" or "child" or other quoted noun from Righi's own comments wasting taxpayer dollars by frivolously calling 911 after being unlawfully detained: before complaining about wastage of taxpayer dollars, cast your eyes towards Mesopotamia, then, again, STFU.

What I really don't get is the level of emotion in the people telling him he's in the wrong for making an issue of it. It's beyond weird and right into scary. I think there are two components. First, I'm pretty sure a lot of it is fame envy ("Why, I could do that, but nobody pays attention to me!"). Second, some of it is the need to clap real hard and pretend excessive authoritarianism in America does not exist. Ipso facto, every abuse of power must be non-abuse if we look hard enough, if you're following me here. Because otherwise we'd have to admit we have a problem. And that might turn us into liberals -- and by extension, homosexual wimps who are crying for foreign domination. Or something. It's always a little scary trying to fathom the authoritarian mind.

I can tell the snark level around here is going to be difficult to keep up with.

I'm scared about the new fonts and layout, but I'm delirious to be commenting at Boing Boing! What does this say about my risk-taking nature?