I don't quite get the focus on the sonic blasters, which seemed like the least disturbing option they were using.

I also saw tear gas, rubber bullets, high pressure water cannons, batons and a general beating the crap out of people, all of which seem far more likely to cause serious injury.

Just seems strange that the story isn't titled, "Georgian troops beat the crap out of unresisting protestors". That's the real crime here, isn't it?

Ah now that's a Directory to a Wonderful Thing! Memory has always been fascinating to me. I've long held to the theory that we never really forget anything, we simply lose the index. I've been driving down the road before and seen some scene that reminded me of a dream I'd had years ago -- the kind of dream where I'd woken up and forgotten it moments later, yet here I am remembering it with clarity because I saw some building that brought it all back out.

Interestingly, Mythbusters did a segment recently about hypnosis improving your memory. It worked for them.

I'm officially agnostic. I avoid being atheist mostly by a number of highly suspect things in life. One of them is the way memory works. Highly suspect.

Teresa,
Posting the link isn't sensationalist.

Putting a title of "Video of man tasered to death" definately is. It's a sensationalist title especially given the lack of evidence that the cause of death was the taser (and I as commented earlier, it looks far more likely that his death was the result of sheer physical confrontation. He's still struggling with the police a full 2 minutes after the taser hit.)

I'm not sure where you were going with the "tough guy" comments. You make these personal attacks against BB readers a lot and I never understand the purpose of them.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2007/11/14/bc-taserrelease.html?ref=rss

From the link:
"After police subdued Dziekanski with the Taser and handcuffed him on the ground, the video shows how one officer in the video put his entire body weight on Dziekanski's head and neck while another put his weight on Dziekanski's back, Pritchard said."

I'm not sure at what point this happened in the video but that's been the cause of death in other incidents: asphyxiation due to too much weight being applied during the arrest.

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KM (19),
Before tasers it was pepper spray. Before pepper spray it was sticks, guns and fists.

Here's an interesting report. I wish I could find one like this for taser usage. Maybe one hasn't been made yet:
http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/195739.pdf

It basically demonstrates how officer injury rates as well as suspect injury rates decline after pepper spray was introduced.

In other words, without pepper spray and tasers, officers had to use physical force and this resulted in more injuries for everyone. When we propose removing tasers, we're really proposing we go back to a time where injuries and deaths were more common.

And lest we forget the dangers police officers face:
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homepage/20071113_Troubling_rise_in_shooting_of_police.html

Jun Dai (24) raised the best point, which is that this is an isolated incident and sensationalist journalism based on isolated incidents isn't doing anyone any favors.

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Hmm...

BBC rtcl:
"H sd s ths ws hppnng, nthr ffcr ws pntng rl gn t hs hd."

Yrkshr Pst (qtng Gbrt) --
"'Wht gs thrgh my mnd nw s wht wld hv hppnd f thy hd bn crryng rl gns lk thy wr n Lndn. t gvs m nghtmrs.'"

S... rl gns wr prsnt nd pntng t hs hd r nt?

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f t ctlly hppnd.

So it was actually the taser that killed him then, and not the physical struggle? At 7:12 you can still seem him violently struggling after the tasering has stopped. At 8:12 the filmer makes a comment of "Why is he still fighting them off?" Long after the taser.

I think it's far more likely he had a heart attack as the result of the physical struggle. All the well placed nightsticks and judo holds in the world won't save someone who insists on continuing to struggle and fight until he has a heart attack and dies.

I don't see where the taser was necessary (I don't see where it gained the police anything) but I also think you're playing to the crowd with your thriller title of "video of man tasered to death".

It should be "video of man who dies apparently as a result of physically struggling with the police". You guys seem to think that batons and physical confrontations are some kind of ultra humane alternative to tasers when in fact it looks like the physical confrontation is what killed the guy.

I also wonder what the guy with the baton is whacking on at 8:27.

Yep, basically what I was trying to say, Tony.

I ultimately decided that point #11 of the Cowboy Code would be "don't argue on the internet with people who are determined to hate their country. Nothing you say will change their mind and most people realize they're nuts anyway so there's really no need to argue."

:-p

I would think it would be like writing the next Harry Potter book. You can't. It's not your license. If she wants to authorize it, that's fine, but I'm not sure I see the basis to let someone else steal her work for profit.

Fair use means you can quote a book as part of your book. Claiming fair use in order to create a book containing almost nothing in it except J.K. Rowling's work and then publishing it as one's own seems like a mighty stretch.

Same reason I can't create "The Guide to Metallica" CD that has all of my favorite Metallica snippets and then sell it.

Yes, but if you click the link, you see that he (er, I mean, someone else!) had a small pile of signs to swap.

Basically it's "look at this cool thing I did! I mean... found... that someone else who is certainly not me must have done, because I don't want to take responsibility for vandalism." :-p

Meh.

Yeah, this guy's conclusions are worthless because he's not comparing serving sizes. You're really going to compare the saturated fat in a 58 gram White Castle burger to the saturated fat in a 602 gram Double Six Dollar Burger? Really?

Also, the calories discussion is a bit silly. You're probably going to want to eat more than 58 calories (or 602 calories) per day, so green lining a single White Castle burger for low calories is fairly useless. Comparing sodium-per-calorie or fat-per-calorie would be more revealing.

Luckily he had taken a snapshot of the original sign before "spotting" the new sign, otherwise we wouldn't have that handy reference.

And I agree with Kipesquire: why is vandalism cool? This ranks right up there with dropping "electronic cricket" litter around the city.

Heh, I'd never thought about that, Derek but you're right.

If you disemvowel something like, "I am very dissatisfied with the international politics of the Geoerge W Bush administration" it's way harder to read than if you disemvowel, "Bush supporters all suck dick". Just an example.

It practically encourages snippy trollish behavior over rational discussion. Nobody wants to type up 3 paragraphs of rational discussion only to have it made too painful to read, but they might risk a one liner.

Promoting the welfare of, say, Japan at the expense of say, North Korea sounds EXACTLY like something you would do for the greater good.

Blogs are media too. You seem to read those.

To quote Pratchett:
"A mere murderer, well, you had a whole range of options. You had criminals and you had policemen, and there was a sort of see-saw there which balanced out in some strange way. But if you took a man who'd sit down and decided to start a war, what in the name of seven hells could you balance him with? You'd need a policeman the size of a country."

There are some problems that only a country can solve. We've had a whole 60 years without a major war and that gap has only existed because of the threat that a country (specifically America but also alliances like NATO) can present. You don't have to have a country if you don't want, but the bad guys, the guys who want to take your land, take your stuff, shoot you in the head and dump you in a mass grave are the kinds of guys who will work on having a country for themselves. You'd best have your own country together when they come knocking. America's internal resolve to fight terrorism and break up large groups of very bad people is waning and I don't think anyone is going to take over this job.

Donating to Doctors Without Borders and protesting the World Trade Organization and so forth works well for an individual with no loyalties to any country, but there are problems you can't solve like that.

LogicalDash (14),
I'd suggest that a country is made up of people, not made up of a government. The government can be changed and it will still be the same country. In fact, you could move the people to a new location and it would still be the same country. Our government has changed hands and operating philosophies numerous times since its beginning, but it's always been "America", and there's quite a lot about America to be proud of.

Regarding "patriot" and "respect his nation's views":

Those lines turn sour to some of you because you're brainwashed by the media.

Being a patriot doesn't necessarily mean you support the government. Being a patriot means you want what's best for the country. Being a patriot can mean holding a protest in D.C. against something you feel harms the country. Ironically, perhaps, when the courts struck down certain measures of the Patriot Act, that was actually a patriotic deed by the judges, not to mention part of their mandate to uphold the constitution.

Examples of unpatriotic deeds would include interrupting assemblies because you feel your voice should be heard above all others, or declaring that you're going to move to Canada simply because you can't stand it here anymore. A patriot would stay and fight for the good of the country, where "the good of the country" is not necessarily what George Bush thinks it is.

Respecting your nation's views means just that: respecting them. Not necessarily following them yourself. For example, and as a tie in to rule 5, it would still be true to say that the nation's view includes "in God we trust" or perhaps more correctly, "freedom of religion". You don't have to trust in God yourself but you do have to respect other people's desire to do so. Staging a protest during church services because you think Christianity is silly would be an example of being disrespectful of your nation's views.

AT&T involving itself in illegal wiretapping is actually a good example of something that's unpatriotic and disrespectful of the nation's views, even though they were doing it at the request of the government.

Being a Cowboy, I would suggest, is about recognizing a greater good than yourself or your community. It's about recognizing that we have an entire nation of people and trying to think of what's best for us today and 20 years from now.

Things like Iraq can kind of go either way: you can be a Patriot for opposing it because you believe that getting out of Iraq is best for America in the long run, because the longer we stay, the more damage we do to our international relations. Or you can be a Patriot for supporting the war in Iraq because you believe that the threat of the terrorist mindset is too great to America if it's allowed to set up shop and take over an oil rich country.

The important thing is that you're looking to the future and are supporting what you think is best for your country. That's being a patriot.

We Love This Stuff And Want To See More. Yes, We Certainly Do Not Have Any Further Suggestions Because It Is All Perfect Here. How Are You? I Am Fine. (Don't disemvowel me, bro!)

More likely they found him so drunk that they took him to the hospital for alcohol poisoning.

Hospitals can't release someone's medical condition. I'm not sure if the police are allowed to, either (but then, they aren't doctors, so I'm not sure if it would count anyway).

I'm not sure that's a good comparison, Laurie. Genetics is the only factor in your natural hair color, whereas weight is influenced by genetics but ultimately determined by calories in versus calories out. Excess body fat can come easily but I'm not sure I'd say it's normal, or healthy.

I was Googling while wondering "what ever happened to" and found this interview with Yearwood as well as this Boing Boing post on the subject. (Which was actually the top hit.)

Turns out, his leg wasn't broken, though he did have torn ligaments:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/13/1445202

Where did the broken leg rumor start, anyway?

You know, it would be a lot better if global warming supporters would stick to science rather than ad hominem attacks.

Every time someone presents a chart saying that global warming is a scam, the response never disputes the chart -- instead it's more like, "Your chart is wrong because you own stock in Exxon." Er.... what?

Any chance we can ever have a real debate on the subject? It's long overdue and I don't know why scientists and politicans avoid it. Just accept the debate, crush the opposition with the facts and be done with it. Stop with the ad hominem attacks already. Fox News has been trying to schedule a debate like this for ages. Well? Accept it, crush them and move forward. Why is that so hard?

Aw, now why was Jack's thought that gamers = people with Asperger's syndrome left intact but my reversal of his logic was disemvowelled?

I just don't understand the critera being used around here. Is there a manual?

America's enemies are *my* enemies when they "choose" to blow up buildings I might happen to be standing in.

If you want to support the abandonment of Israel and the subsequent armageddon style conflict that would erupt in the middle east, we can certainly avoid having enemies. Millions of people will die, but at least they won't be Americans, right? They'll be mostly the people involved in the nuclear war that would erupt when Iran goes unchecked for about 10 more years and forces a battle to the death with Israel (possibly less than 10 years, depending on how fast they can invade Iraq and turn the extra oil fields into a profit). I also expect that with an isolationist America, China would certainly capture Taiwan and I don't see why they wouldn't go after Japan while they're at it.

I think an America that doesn't want to have any enemies is going to be the first thing that ushers in a new world war. These other powers out there aren't holding back out of the kindness of their hearts, they're holding back because they fear retribution from America.

Er, Miasma, surely you realize that America's enemies already employ torture on prisoners (of war or otherwise), often to the death, sometimes followed by beheading the corpse and dragging it through the streets tied to the back bumper of a car.

I'm not quite sure how anything we do can make our enemies any more horrible than they already are. I'm not quite sure there's anything we can do to make them any nicer, either. Some people are just evil to the core.

To be fair, Comcast seems to only be limiting *uploads* not *downloads*. I download torrents all the time at full speed. I get crazy file transfer times through services like Steam and Direct2Drive.

It's only uploads that knock me out. Transferring files to my website is relatively slow and I can never seed any torrent, which is kind of a bummer.

Still, I've always seen it as paying for an end-user service, which I get and enjoy, not a file-serving service, which I also get and enjoy but I do *that* through a seperate company. I'm sure Boing Boing isn't hosted on Xeni's personal computer at home through her DSL/cable connection. Even if she had the server hardware, no home connection is going to offer that kind of crazy bandwidth for that kind of price and I'm not sure why anyone expects that it should.

Nothing here is deleted accidentally or mangled accidentally. It's intentional.

Everyone starts off by deluding themselves that BoingBoing wouldn't do something so low, but we all eventually learn the truth.

t's fnny, rlly. f YTb thrtns t rvk yr blty t pst, BB dtrs pst bt t lk t's vltn f th cnstttn. Yt hr thy r, hpply scrnng thr wn cntnt fr vn lss rsn thn YTb.

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There's a couple of different angles you can take that would allow this system to work:

1) If it's YouTube doing it, then you don't have any "right" to post on YouTube and they are quite free and able to use a "guilty if we even suspect you might be guilty" model. They're covering their own ass. If the system can remove 99% of copyrighted material and wipe out 5% of non-copyrighted material due to false positives, they'd probably find that acceptable.

2) The system could be intended to have a human componet, which would make sense. The program doesn't remove any video but it does flag them as "possible copyright violations". Some human comes along, looks at the video, looks at the source video that the program paired it with and decides if there was a violation or not. This system is designed to seperate the 5% of things that Need To Be Examined from the 95% that don't.

Ah you're right. Though it's interesting that you think global warming is "political". Oh, there are politics all over it, for sure, but the issue itself is scientific, not political.

@3,
They're simulating the perfect city, not the perfect human being. You can't have a functioning city with no authority until you first invent a type of human being that doesn't require authority to function in large groups. Perhaps it could be a city for robots, though. They don't require authority or spirituality!

The Great Global Warming Swindle was a BBC doc, too, but nobody seemed to like that one...

Meh.

Just sell the anti-consumer hunk-o-crap and wait for the gPhone or similar product that will be just like the iPhone but without all of the restrictions.

I think that's a good point, Seth. It's like the Ann Coulter school of thought (or that's how I think of it, anyway). Moderate, thoughtful debates get you nowhere. Who do we even know that's a famous spokesperson known for moderate, thoughtful debates? Wild one sided stories and name calling, now, that'll make you famous and I'm sure we can name a dozen people who use that style.

So I suspect the Keen haters, like the Coulter haters, are probably just playing right into their game, exactly as intended.

Most of what Keen is saying is technically true -- the internet IS bloated with the hot air of ameteur journalists. There must be, what, 10 million bloggers out there? More or less depending on where you draw the line, I'd bet. And probably 99% of them are average Joe Schmoes like me (I have a blog, too! And I have no formal journalistic training! Hey, I think Keen might have been insulting me! That bastard!)

But the language he uses is obviously meant to incite arguments, if not necessarily debate. That's his chosen road to fame and glory, I guess, and it'll probably work better than any moderate approach.

It might not have been deleted. It's hard to say around here. The rules aren't posted anywhere so nobody really knows what's going on at any given point in time.

Reasonable123,
Don't request more information if you're going to go all ad hominem on it without reading the information it presents. Did you find some error with the maps?

(Of course I know the answer is 'no', because the opinion didn't agree with yours, therefore you didn't look at it.)

Flamingphonebook, the day you murder a kid because you were speeding down a neighborhood street will be the first day of your new life as a broke-ass convict, arrested and sued. I'd add "and you'll have to live with it for the rest of your life, knowing what you did" but you sound like a cretin so maybe that part's not going to be a problem for you.

#30,
Here you go:
http://duoquartuncia.blogspot.com/2007/06/cycling-sensibly.html

Ultimately it will be for the courts to decide, but it sounds like Orsak will have an uphill battle.

Mostly you don't hear about these types of counter-arguments because 99% of bloggers simply repost the original look-what-the-evil-government-did-this-time story and it's very hard to find anything other than the same story reposted 5,000 times. The counter argument will end up being on one blog on page 32 of your Google search, because apparently reality is less entertaining than fiction.

Actually, Swell, with #2, the guy attempted to ride away on an expressway where bicycles were prohibited. They had to tackle him to stop him because he started to ride out even after the police told him he can't. He's probably lucky he didn't get himself or someone else killed in a traffic accident.

(The story at the time didn't contain this information, because it was one-sided. It's often necessary to do the legwork to find out the entire story before jumping to conclusions.)

I thought plagiarism was cool around here. Aren't we against such concepts as "intellectual property" and copyrights and so forth? It's like copying music.

War crimes get reported every time they're found out about, so I'm not sure what you're wanting, Teresa.

What we need is more reporting of the successes, which are entirely ignored outside of independent reporters.

It takes a minute for comments to appear. Although sometimes they do vanish later on.

Plus, it's still "evolution", even if it's evolving into something shorter, dumber and hairier. I'm not sure what "de-evolution" would be.

Why the rush to judgement to say the staff and then the police didn't try to handle the situation peacefully and only resorted to force when left with no other choice?

Oh right, because we read too many blogs and comic books, so rational analysis isn't really our strongpoint anymore. Innocent until proven what? Oh, that only applies to college students, not people who wear uniforms. Uniforms mean they're guilty and if they somehow prove they're innocent, it's only because of a government coverup operation.

#4: Don't forget MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, NPR and most of the Associated Press.

Brand name media has been seriously lacking in investigative reporting for years. You only get one sided stories that pander to particular points of view and anything that doesn't fit that point of view is discarded (or simply not investigated). American troops who commit a war crime get front page news and hours of airtime but American troops who get the medal of honor get put somewhere in the Metro section and maybe a brief mention on the air. (American troops who accomplish missions and do a great job only get mentioned in the press reports of independent reporters...)

@20, Mn,
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They also said it took 3 people to handcuff him. It seems more likely to me that the cause of death will end up being related to someone having a knee in his ribcage during the act of trying to physically subdue him. It won't be the taser that killed him, it will be the physical componet.

And the physical componet was necessary since he was throwing furniture.

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@2,
I'm pretty sure that is the original one. It's the same one I found when I went out looking, anyway. The FBI agent never actually said the word "torture"; it was inferred by Higazy when the FBI threatened to call up the Egyptian security forces and have them make his family's lives a "living hell".

Which is still coercion.

I can understand the court's decision to try and redact their document. Basically what they tried to take back was all the bits where Higazy said how cruel and terrible the Egyptian security forces are, and thus why he thought the threat was credible. He's in Egypt right now, I read, which means the bad people he badmouthed are within driving distance of his house. Probably not a good thing. They might not appreciate their critics over there.

I think he's going to have a hard time proving his case, though, unless there's actually a video or transcript of the interrogation that the government would admit to having (which they might -- if the government is in the business of coverups, it's not been very good at it).

Although I don't doubt that there are plenty of undertrained FBI agents, Marshals, etc, running around since 9/11. It's an easy story to believe.

That explains the cones, too. Anyone getting inside the cones and leaning down would see the platform. Although the guy who walked over and waved his arm underneath was a nice touch. I figure, either he was paid to do that or was just being very sporting. ("Ah, a platform. Well I'll wave my arm and be a part of the show!")

It would be nice to see him get started, though. If the device is clever, he ought to be able to use it without, e.g., spending 5 minutes screwing his stick into the ground or jacking himself up off the ground one inch at a time with a pumping motion on the stick... which for all I know is exactly how he sets it up.

Yes, we know your core idea: "Reality is always the better choice." Compared to what?

What you completely fail to understand is that it's ALL reality. Playing the guitar is reality. Reading a book is reality. Playing a game is reality. Sitting in your room quietly thinking is reality.

I think what you really mean is, "Face to face interaction with other people is the best way to live." Which I happen to disagree with. It's one way to live, and I'm not convinced it's the best one. I prefer a more introverted, introspective route, personally.

What a shame. If only we could see what it looked like before it was ruined by being put in the trash. Now look at it! It's just a mess!

Ho ho ho.

Actually World of Warcraft has 4 variations: Normal, PvP, Roleplay and Roleplay PvP. Just like chess variants, each game type has its own specific rules and make it differ slightly from normal.

There are many ways to play WOW. You can quest, you can bash creatures with your stick, you can fight players in PvP areas (which varies with ruleset), you can sit around and talk about baseball (or Chuck Norris jokes), you can roleplay an Orc, you can "roleplay" a "good Orc" who "wants to join the Alliance", you can group up, you can solo, you can join massive raids, you can pick flowers, you can go fishing, etc, etc, etc. As I said, it's a very complex game. Don't pretend to dictate to me what WOW is and isn't.

Since you bring up money, though, do you think that playing the guitar is a "mugs game" for paying someone for that guitar? Is going to the movies a "mugs game" for paying the theater to go watch something on their screen? Define this "mugs game" for me. It sounds like it encompasses quite a lot of stuff. (I wasn't aware that $15 for 40+ hours of entertainment was some kind of exorbitant fee. I actually still pay EVE $15/month even though I don't play anymore, simply because I feel I ought to support the genre. It's like giving extra money to your favorite artists in the hope they'll produce another hit one day.)

However, if you'd rather run all over than farm from level 1-70, then you might enjoy Star Wars Galaxies, Planetside or Ultima Online, which are considered to be "sandbox" or "horizontal" game designs, compared to WOW's "storyline" or "vertical" game design. In storyline game design, your character progresses along a set path (meaning levels, in this case) and moves forward through the world as he goes. In sandbox schemes, you are free to go where you wish and do what you want, for the most part, because you don't gain power so much as diversity.

So now it seems you've gone from disliking video gaming as a hobby to simply disliking the particular type of video game that WOW represents because it doesn't appeal to you. Progress!

Like I said earlier,if someone thinks that playing games is a waste of time, they're probably just playing the wrong games.

Once again, I shall flog you with your own definitions. Can you play chess and move a pawn like a queen? If you get into checkmate can you decide that your knight was really the king in disguise and hahaha you really fooled your opponet this time?

No, you can't. By your definition, this must greatly diminish the worthiness of chess, since you aren't free to play how you want.

You can take the pieces and play a different game, but then it's not Chess. "Games" are created with rules and one of the rules of World of Warcraft is that Orcs are members of the Horde, just like one of the rules of chess is that you only get 1 king.

And Garrett, need I remind you of your "Sucker Born Every Minute" quote? Your very first message was an attack on people who choose to play video games. We are not suckers, however much you choose to believe otherwise. We don't think you're against gaming because you're not a gamer, we think you're against gaming because you've told what a dim view you have both of it and of the people who do it, repeatedly.

Also, you know, your assesment that WOW is so simple it can be done as a job kinda... doesn't make sense. Heart transplants can also be done as a job, but I'm not sure that means it's simple.

As for complexity, WOW is highly complex. I think you'd struggle to find a more complex game in existance today (well, maybe The Sims) and as a result, there's a great number of ways to experience it. As for the actual difficulty of the game, which seems to be what you're arguing, the answer there is that "it is and it isn't". WOW can be either very easy or very difficult depending on how you choose to play. So you see, it actually is quite flexible, but like all games, it does still have rules.

Don't let the other BB readers hear you insult Pratchett. Them thar's fightin' words. I've gotten a great deal of enjoyment out of Pratchett's writing, and enjoyment in life is gold to me. This inclination of yours to poo-poo the things that makes other people happy is stupefying.

Jack in particularly seems to attempt to define "value" by real world influence, in which case, art house movies and underground comics are far more worthless than WOW. This is where the anti-game reasoning falls apart and invites these analogies everyone has been presenting: you are contradicting yourselves in the act of trying to justify your distaste for online gaming. The very reasons you say this hobby is a waste ends up defining your own hobbies as even more of a waste. WOW is more social than reading underground comics and in the end, there are more people you can talk about it with. I've struck up conversations in resturaunts with total strangers simply because they overheard us talking and turned around and said, "You're talking about WOW? Oh, we play too!"

I understand the point you're trying to make (which is very similar to a religious argument meant to save our souls from the sins of vices which we happen to enjoy), but you both seem incapable of understanding the value of introspection or the validity of introversion as anything other than a mental illness (Jack's "Asperger Syndrome" reference). Jack says that "interacting with real people in a real world ... is infinitely better than sitting at home" and that's a very revealing thing to say. You say our problem is that we gamers have "little/no attention span"; well as long as we're slinging them kinda accusations, I'll say your problem is you are so busy interacting with real people in a real world that you never take the time for a little quiet reflection on yourself and how you relate to the rest of the world. If you did, you might realize that not everyone loves to go out clubbing and exploring the city streets, and you have no right or basis to tell them that their lifestyle is inferior to yours. If you had any imagination, you might be able to imagine how other people can enjoy things that you don't, and yet still be experiencing things which are just as interesting and valuable to them as what you choose to experience is to you. Don't assume people are wasting their lives just because they don't enjoy the same types of things that you do.

I might die without ever setting foot in Ireland and you know, I don't think my last thought is going to be, "Darn! I didn't get to see Ireland!" (It might be, "Darn! I almost had my Paladin to level 70!") In an infinite lifespan, I would love to see Ireland. In a lifespan where any one of us might die tomorrow, I see great value in having fun with my friends right here and now. Seeing Irish rocks sounds cool and all, but there's plenty of stuff I can spend time doing with my friends right here and now.

And one of them, Steam has just informed me, is playing Team Fortress 2. Vllad just signed on, so I think I'll go join him and set fire to some enemies. Enjoy your rocks!

What is "TRD nt WRD" anyway? Disemvowelling sometimes makes posts all the more attractive. It's like a puzzle! I end up dwelling on them far more than other posts sometimes, because anything worth censoring must be worth reading, as school boards across the country occasionally demonstrate.

Let's see...

"s n sd: tkng ll th vwls t f ppl's psts s TRD nt WRD."

That first bit is tricky too. As? So? No? An? sd is probably "said". Well, let's skip it for now, it's probably not important.

"Taking all the vowels from people's posts is ___ not(?) ____."

Given the context, it must be negative in nature. TRD nt WRD. Hmmm.

They should do disemvoweled crossword puzzles as an extra level of difficulty.

Garrett,
You claimed to have played WOW, but clearly you haven't. Blizzard's style is closer to Pratchett than Tolkien. Much of what they do is intentionally tongue-in-cheek and is as much of a parody of the fantasy genre as it is a new entry. You'll find numerous references to all sorts of fantasy settings in WOW and a lot of it is quite intentionally funny. This is a big part of WOW's appeal: it doesn't take itself seriously and neither should you. This has been a hallmark of Blizzard games since Warcraft 1.

You've drawn a completely arbitary line in the sand, beyond which you claim that anyone is wasting their lives. Your justification for this line is very weak, since all it comes down to is "computerized gaming is for losers". You consider it more valuable to sit in your house by yourself and play your guitar than to log on with all your friends and play a game.

You're allowed to consider it to be more fun, but you're not allowed to tell me it's more valuable. That's where you start coming off as a troll, and not the fun kind.

The root of the issue, I believe, is Jack's sentence, "It's the difference between dressing up like a fantasy character and playing pretend and truly believing you ARE that character and disconnecting from reality."

Sorry, what? I don't disconnect from reality when I play a game any more than I do when I read or any more than you do when you play the guitar.

The only fantasy in this debate is the one you and Jack have about what gamers are like or what gaming is all about. You're delivering speeches when you should be asking questions, because you clearly lack understanding. Ask your questions and I'm sure we'll be happy to help.

When I was a kid, we didn't really have video games. We had to go out and play games like "War", which is where one child pretends to murder another child by pointing at him with a finger, stick, or, ideally, realistic looking toy gun, and going, "Bang!" whereupon the other child was encouraged to clutch his chest, yell, "Argh!" and fall down. If we'd had access to exploding packets of fake blood and wouldn't get yelled at for getting it on our clothes, I'm sure we would have used them.

Barbaric, I know, yet somehow we all grew up and didn't become homicidal maniacs. Somehow we all figured out how to seperate fiction from reality.

Fiction was more fun. Still is. I'll see your Irish rocks and raise you a Stargate.

If you think today's children are "raised on violent video games" and this "can only lead to disaster", I can only wonder in amazement at what your own childhood was like, that you can't seem to relate to any of this. Do you really think many death row inmates were raised playing video games? I think you greatly mistake the source of violent behaviors in our society. For all your worldly knowledge, you get the strangest things wrong.

Clearly, you and Jack must feel sorry for me, that I can immerse myself so readily in fiction. Well, I feel sorry for you guys, that you can't, or won't. I grew up, but I didn't grow old. I'm amazed you even know what The Wizard of Oz is, since it sounds like exactly the sort of thing you don't approve of. Witches? A talking scarecrow? Surely these are perposterous examples of someone else's slipshod immitation knock-off fantasy world, as you called it.

Star Trek, Discworld, Alice in Wonderland, Azeroth, Middle Earth and a million other fantasy worlds may be so much artificial rubbish to you, but I like em, and I think I'll keep em, and my friends and I (some who live local, some who live across the globe) can continue to have a good time experiencing them and talking about them. We can enjoy rocks in Ireland, but I'll add on the worlds of Neil Gaiman and yes, the World of Warcraft, and no regrets there.

@51, Garrett:
I guess I never outgrew "make believe". Most artists don't. Putting an apple on a desk and painting a picture of it is all good and well, but painting a picture of something that never existed is our old friend "make believe", and it's the basis for quite a lot of great art. I'd take Lord of the Rings any day over a Tipper Gore biography, even if LOTR is "simulated reality" and thus, if I understand your definitions, a waste of time compared to a real world biography.

You worry that we're more interested in imagination than the real. I'm worried that you're so interested in the real, you've lost your imagination.

Would I trade in my WOW time for other experiences? Not really. It was great fun and I have good memories and long lasting friendships with people all over the world as a result. We stay in touch via website so we can hook back up for other games. I can't think of why I would want to trade that away.

To be fair, my understanding is that the Bittorrent Effect only impacts people who are serving (uploading) files, not downloading them.

So yes, people who buy Comcast high speed internet expect to be able to download big honking files really quickly and in my experience, they can. I get ridiculous download speeds through my service.

If they expect to run a file server, then frankly they need to get a better connection. You're not going to get high speed servers for the cost of Comcast cable. That type of service will cost you a whole lot more and you'll probably get it from some other company. My upload rates are frankly crap and I wouldn't even attempt to run so much as a Team Fortress 2 server from my home. For that, I rent other servers.

@38, Jack:
So people who play WOW probably have a mental impairment? Yikes. So tell us, what is it YOU do for fun? Cure cancer? Save polar bears? You must be really full time productive to be so down on anyone who likes to take a break and have fun. I played WOW for 2 years. My girlfriend actually still plays. We also have friends we hang out with on weekends (IRL!), plus read books, watch TV, go hiking, etc. You and Garrett have an unrealistically narrow view of what types of people play these games. The "hard core" 40-hour-a-week-in-their-mother's-basement types are by far the exception, and Blizzard's own statistics support this. The vast majorty of WOW players have never set foot in the deepest, darkest dungeon, because the vast majority of WOW players are normal, casual people who play with friends for fun. It's not their lifetime commitment.

There's also about a billion people who sit at home occasionally reading fiction who would probably like a word with you. You don't need to have Asperger syndrome to enjoy a night at home doing something "unproductive", you know.

The top thing on my list of "Things to Do Before I Die", actually, is HAVE FUN. I'm at a loss to figure out how playing a guitar is somehow more beneficial to mankind and less of a waste of time than playing a game. By the time you're 80 years old in the old folks home, the only people who are going to care are probably other gamers or other guitar players, respectively. We can reflect back on the good old days before arthitis kicked in and made us unable to hit that chord or pwn those noobs. Personally, I get a lot more discussion milage out of past video game experiences than I bet most guitarists get out of guitar playing.

I've said in the past that if someone thinks that playing games is a waste of time, they're probably just playing the wrong games.

@18 Garrett,
I shouldn't have to tell you that most people who play WOW also do other things, just like most people who watch TV don't sit there and watch it all day. It may shock and surprise you to know that some musicians, artists and writers also enjoy other activities, including TV and games (and, heaven forbid, family, friends and surfing Boing Boing).

Don't belittle people over something you obviously don't care to even find out about. It's like talking down to people who enjoy the beach. Those silly beach goers who spend all their lives at the beach will never be able to compete with my elite skills in non-beach activities! Muhuhuhuhahaha!

Anyway, this blog entry is silly. It essentially says, "Bush is pandering to a group of over 50,000,000 rural Americans -- why isn't he also pandering to a this significantly smaller group?"

I mean really, is this on anyone's top 10 reasons for why they hate Bush? We hate Bush because he respects rural America? That bastard! Lets go march on the white house. Find some rural Americans and see if they'll lend us their pitchforks and torches.

@10,
"Mr. Jones refused to move when asked..." So the officer apparently did what you suggested -- asked the person to move. I assume the running away was after a refusal to move and a subsequent effort to write him a ticket or whatever.

This reminds me of that bicycler story a while back, the one where the guy was tackled by the police for nothing other than wanting to ride his bike to and from the airport. That was his story. The real story was uncovered later, which was that he wanted to ride his bike on an expressway where bikes are prohibited and liable to cause an accident, not to mention get himself killed, and they forced him off the bike when he ignore them and tried to get on the expressway.

I just have a feeling this case is the same type of thing. We have the defendent's word that he was standing there minding his own business and was assaulted by the police for no reason whatsoever. Hey, it's possible. Could be a dirty cop. But usually we're only being given part of the story, which is the part that doesn't make the storyteller look like a fool. (They always leave that part out.)

I don't quite see how what the Comcast guy said was "hilarious, stupid lies". He said, "While 99.9% of Comcast customers get access to the Internet without interference, the 0.1% that fit into the category of excessive use have to be managed."

The blogger then went on to assume that Comcast achieves this ratio by blocking .1% of all customers at random, which is a pretty silly conclusion.

Obviously Comcast considers bittorrent to be part of that 0.1% and all bittorrent users are squelched accordingly. The ones that aren't are probably the ones lucky enough to live in an area where the required software or hardware has not yet been implemented.

At any rate, it seems like a stupid way for Comcast to implement throttling. It would be better to set a bandwidth ceiling and phone up people who break it and tell them they need to dial it down, pay more money or find another provider.

Those of us who use bittorrent once in a blue moon shouldn't be penalized just because some people somewhere else are abusing it.

I suspect the real explanation is a bit more literal, if not quite as excititing in an omg-conspiracy sort of way. From the blog, "At San Diego International Airport, tests are run by passengers whom local TSA managers ask to carry a fake bomb, said screener Cris Soulia..."

In other words, TSA managers get other TSA employees (and/or contractors) to carry the fake devices through security, as passengers. They are passengers in the sense that they have a ticket and are indistinguishable from the rest of the crowd.

The blogger assumes that someone off the street buys a ticket and then gets asked to carry a fake bomb when it's almost certainly TSA employees.

I think it's actually a really good thing. One more reason for TSA to treat passengers nicely: one of them might be hired by your boss to see how you're doing.

@Garrett, 3:
Why the hate? Coders, comic book writers and novelists are worthless unless there are people willing to sit at home and consume their code, comic books and novels. Video games are no different. For every good artist, there's a bunch of admiring fans who take time out of their day to enjoy the art.

Don't be hatin' on consumers. Without us, there's not much point in being a producer.