@#22, Phikus: I think 'I will torture you' from '24: Season Two: The Musical' got there first.

@#1, Logruszed: It is indeed a poor counter-argument, but that's not to say better ones don't exist. There's pretty compelling evidence that iPhone buyers also make heavy use of their iPhones, and that does suggest good design.

iWoodn't

@#48, Simon Bradshaw: In that case you're in luck! If you ask someone at the Home Office they'll tell you that all their policy directives are clear and firm, and they'll also point out that when devising directives that may restrict civil liberties they take great pains to limit their scope to the absolute minimum necessary.

Saying you don't think you should need a mechanism to get badly applied laws overturned seems excessively utopian. By the same token, we shouldn't need a police force or social security either. The judicial review process is a fundamental under-pinning of modern democracy, and I'd rather have that safeguard than futilely pine for a society that has no need of it; if anything, it's a shame that the Administrative Court's powers over parliamentary legislation are so limited.

@#44, Simon Bradshaw: What alternative mechanism to judicial review do you propose? Rock, paper, scissors with the Home Office Minister?

@#54, Torporous: Judaism is a religion, but it's also an ethnicity. In any case, in the context I alluded to the point is moot: I've known children of Jewish parents brought up as Christians specifically to avoid persecution and it didn't make one iota of difference as far as the Nazis were concerned.

@#24, Kellycree: Real people are allowed to maintain their sense of humor in these situations. Xeni's not a presidential candidate.

@#25, Talia: In answer to your last question, yes, but it should be .org instead.

@#1, Daemon: That's nothing. If the title's to be believed, they managed to move a river from Scotland to Iceland too.

@#25, Flynnfx:

What was once acceptable (discriminating against people because of skin colour or religion (ie black people or jews) ) is much the same against those who discriminate because a person has tattoos.

Should you ever happen to present your theory of body modification and discrimination to a Jew or a black person, do not be surprised if they bring a historical perspective to the discussion or place emphasis on the distinction between compulsion and free will.

@#5, Sparkzilla: You seem to be replying to a post from Jack which says something along the lines of "The US government is just as oppressive as the Iranian one", but I can't find it.

Could you point it out to me?

@#26, Agger: On the face of it, Google are pretty well covered on that point.

According to Youtube's Viewing History page, "These are your recently watched videos. We respect your privacy, and do not share this information with anyone. You can clear your history by clicking the 'Clear Viewing History' link at bottom."

Things might get a little more interesting down at Mountain View if that button doesn't actually do what it claims to, though.

@#15 & #17, Tarnished Coin: To quote your quote with a different emphasis,

A video tape service provider may disclose personally identifiable information concerning any consumer—to a law enforcement agency...

There is (or at least there should be) a world of difference between handing something to the police and handing it to representatives of a corporation.

@#23, Spinobobot: Somebody needs a holiday :P

@#545, Hagbard: The hypocrisy lies in being opposed to censorship when others do it, and then censoring their own blog. Apparently, the "it's not censorship when we do it" line isn't working quite as well as anticipated.

@#534, Tillwe: It's not quite that clear cut. If BoingBoing had unpublished a page, say, because the HTML in a table was a mess, no-one (well, hardly anyone) would be crying censorship. Here it's because they don't like someone any more, and that certainly is censorship, regardless of who wrote it, and whether you, I or anyone else would it consider it a reasonable thing to do if we were privy to the justification for it.

@#524, David Thomsen: To be fair, 'unpublish' isn't some Orwellian euphemism dreamt up by BoingBoing, it's just a standard Content Management System term for the button that puts content off-line. However, I do find Teresa's insistence on the "clear" difference between unpublishing and censoring quite amusing. I suspect it's the result of a reasoning process that starts with the conclusion "we don't do censorship" and adjusts the premises to fit.

@#513, Antinous: Sorry, I couldn't work out a pithy enough way of referencing Stalin's airbrush work on those Bolshevik Party Congress group photos.

Care to fill us in on the rest of that irregular verb? If it's 'we unpublish' and 'they censor', how does the second person go?

@#399, Joel:

As we said in the original post, there was clearly some fucking up here on our part, although I can report that even in our internal discussions we weren't entirely sure what a better course of action might have been. And it's difficult to say "We'll never do that again" when we're not sure what a better option would have been.

Are you channelling Donald Rumsfeld?

A few observations:
i) a lone moron will usually reach better decisions than a committee of smart people
ii) unpublishing is to self-censorship as water-boarding is to torture
iii)private issues are not best dealt with via your publication.

Next time, try amending your Christmas card lists.

Oh, and now would probably be a great time to dig 50 or so "wonderful things" out of your reject piles.

@#1, Historyman68: Just how many Californians can there be who "need" to make phone calls while driving, can afford $15-$30 in gas for their daily commute but can't afford a hands-free headset?

I'm a lumberjack, and I'm OK, but out of curiosity, is this stuff just for beards, or does work for friendly mutton chops as well?

@#3, Holtt: Evidently you're one of those visually-impaired people to whom Rob was referring. It has big holes at the sides for legs and arms to stick out of.

What better way to complement magical processors than by sprinkling a little pixie dust on their press quotes too?

Who can blame Cell Ranger's marketing wizards for feeling that the New York Times' phrase "Useful in areas where signals are too weak..." was rendered overly equivocal when preceded by "it could be" as was the case in its original incarnation?

Then there's the deft spinning of MobileBurn's coverage. To lesser minds, an announcement of an up-coming product based entirely on a press release by the manufacturer of the product in question, might not be an obvious source of review quotes, but the wizards at Cell Ranger nevertheless managed to cull from it the ringing endorsement "...can also be used by multiple handsets at the same time...". If this banal declaration of specs sounds suspiciously like the kind of phrase you'd expect to find in a product launch press release from, say, Cell Ranger, you'd be wholly mistaken, as is demonstrated by CrunchGear's coverage, which blockquotes an excerpt from Cell Ranger's press release containing the radically different phrase "...can also be used by multiple handsets simultaneously...".

Still, at least there's that glowing CrunchGear quote: "They markedly improve most “dead zone” situations and even speed up EDGE...". Anyone would be proud of a quote like that about their product, so why spoil things by letting folks know that the "they" in question refers to all the other competing products that have actually been tried by CrunchGear?

No need to imagine, Rob. Here's the forensic report by Tami Loehrs which Fiola commissioned. The exculpatory evidence is pretty overwhelming, but the best bit's the part of the summary where the DIA guys who handled the original "investigation" get their asses handed to them.

I think Fnarf's on the right track: the dumbbells don't change weight, they're supposed to make use of gyroscopic inertia to make them feel heavier when you move them in a certain direction.

That's at least theoretically possible, although I would think it you'd have to get an awful lot of rpms out of gyros small enough to fit in those tubes for it to actually work. Anyone know if breaking the sound barrier leads to problems for gyros?

I'm obviously far too lazy to sign up for a dev account and view the context, but it may be worth noting that Google Earth has similar restrictions:

Except where you have been specifically licensed by Google to do so, you may not use the Google Earth Software in connection with any products, systems, or applications installed or otherwise connected to or in communication with vehicles for or in connection with: (a) real time route guidance (including without limitation, turn-by-turn route guidance and other routing that is enabled through the use of a sensor); (b) any systems or functions for automatic or autonomous control of vehicle behavior; or (c) dispatch, fleet management or similar applications.

Is it possible that Apple's restriction is not on the development of navigation software per se, but on the creation of navigation software which works by spamming an Apple maps server via API calls?

@#29: I'm not sure that is the question everyone's asking, because the answer is all too obvious: it stops when accountability starts.

Assuming things happened as described, there might be a good (in the logical, rather than moral sense) reason for it: if there's some image recognition software backing up the security cameras, a picture of a gun would throw up a false positive.

Sharon Stone is now called Phil Bronstein!?

@#19: Fairness is so last year.

How can I make an informed decision when the ad doesn't even say whether the drive uses MFM or RLL encoding?

@#1: People also seem to forget changes in energy costs in these calculations too. When was the last time electricity prices fell in California?

@#14:You're wrong, of course: it's actually a Rajput name adopted by, among others, Sikhs. Still, thanks for supplanting Paul's affected display of ignorance for comic effect with the real thing.

@#40, Antinous: What's that 6 billion based on? There's no evidence of anything remotely like 3 years without sleep not just in humans currently inhabiting the planet, but in any species of mammal. The odds of it being a false claim vastly outweigh those of it being true: it'd be like finding a 3,000 year-old man when no-one else has made it past 120.

If these are DVD-D based, then they're not quite as environmentally hostile as they sound. The cases are made of cardboard, and polycarbonate discs are highly recyclable because they're thermoplastic.

@#9, Mikey: For ordinary purposes, OCR needs to get it right almost all of the time, whereas spammers only need it be right a fraction of the time to be worthwhile.

In any case, this is a much easier problem to solve: Hotmail's CAPTCHA, for example, is always 8 characters, which are always upper case or numbers (I presume that actually means 35 possibilities if they leave out zero and O), and always in the same font. If you can strip out just some of the junk and determine where one character ends and the next one starts, then any half-way decent OCR library should be able to give you acceptable results.

@#56, Invictus: This may come as a shock to you, but cattle are frequently slaughtered merely for money even when they're not infected with foot-and-mouth disease.

No, no, Erik's got it completely wrong.

This facility isn't bringing foot-and-mouth disease to Kansas, it's bringing every animal and zoonotic disease to Kansas.

When asked about safety concerns, Senator Roberts replied, "The citizens of Raccoon City have nothing to fear".

I too was shocked when I read the letter. How anyone could complain about being illegally detained and the unavailability of CPVC 1/2" elbows at Home Depot in the same letter is completely beyond me.

@#16 A point that might have been worth making were the subject matter, say, a nuanced analysis of Eichenbaum's work in the late 1920s. In case it had escaped your notice, we are in fact dealing with a puerile allusion to a photo of a man who has an arse like a wind sock.

@#1 It's nice and practical in the sense that it's easy to do, and not something that can be characterized as an arcane theoretical exploit which won't work in the real world, which is what credit card companies have traditionally done whenever anyone pointed out the holes in the Emperor's New Shield.

That the manufacturers were given 3 months advance notice of the findings and chose to do nothing until these exploits were made public should tell you all you need to know about what does and doesn't work if you want to get something like this fixed.

@#17 The Dell isn't a TV, but that doesn't make the headline any less true: there are plenty of HDTVs around which aren't HDCP compliant (I own one, for example). While it may be true that you could buy an HDCP compliant TV in 2004, it would have been something of a speculative purchase given that HDCP only got FCC approval in August of that year and EICTA didn't roll it into their HD Ready spec until January 2005.

@#13 The analogy works better than you might imagine :)

Firstly, I'm pretty certain that most people would find it easier to print $100 million than withdraw it from their checking account, but if that's not true for you, keep adding zeroes until it is.
Secondly, and by an uncanny coincidence, the reason why banknotes are difficult to copy is because governments have gone to considerable trouble in implementing copy protection mechanisms (digital as well as analogue).Hmm... maybe they're on to something with this HDCP stuff.

Perhaps you were simply too well brought up to pass the time imagining circumstances under which ignoring the rule of law might expedite matters. In Italy, however, we're brought up with a more sceptical approach to legal impedimenta. If you already know how to drive, isn't getting a license a waste of time? Wouldn't it be quicker (and cheaper) to transact business informally and in cash, rather than dealing with all those invoices, accountants and tax returns? Do you save any time be waiting at the supermarket checkout to pay for your purchases instead of simply walking out of the store with them?

Obviously, in some countries at least, such pastimes might result in extensive first-hand experience of the local judicial system, but then again, you could say the same from downloading movies from the Pirate Bay.

@#11 When you say the blocks are only put in place after the product is created, what is the product you're referring to? Has someone come to your house and DRMed your TV, HTPC, movie files and Bluray discs while you weren't looking? Microsoft may have done, so there's that other industry you were looking for :)

I don't like HDCP any more than anyone else does - not least because I bought my first supposedly HD Ready HDTV before HDCP was adopted - but I think there are a few disingenuous claims being made on the subject.

Firstly, it's not entirely true to say that picking up a movie from, say, the Pirate Bay, is hassle-free: assuming you know enough to get a client and blocklist set up, you then need to learn how to distinguish between the real stuff and malware, poor quality rips and hoaxes. Then it's simply a matter of waiting for the download to complete (possibly days in the case of HD video) and getting used to most of your outgoing bandwidth disappearing for a good deal longer while you seed back to 100%.

Secondly, it's not true that DRM has no impact on piracy either, particularly when it comes to rental. Can you seriously imagine anyone renting a DRM-free movie via download, and then deciding after their 72 hours (or whatever) are up, "I liked that movie so much that I'll want to watch it again and again, but I'll delete the movie like I'm supposed to and then I'll download exactly the same file for more money so that I can keep it forever". Without some form of rights management (whether physical or digital), there's no such thing as a viable rental market, so bemoaning the existence of DRM on rented files is pointless. If, on the other hand, you want to criticise the implementation, that's a different story.

@#1 From previous movies, perhaps, but not from one single movie.

This review suggests Capcom knew what they were getting themselves into.

@#6 Maybe he only had an Apple Cinema Display. Oops.

@#3 All true, (or at any rate, I agree with you).

My point was that Cory's observation that downloading movies illegally can be easier than doing so legally doesn't mean a whole lot because most things are less onerous if done without regard for the law.

...and people who print their own banknotes don't have to wait in line at the ATM.

What's your point, Cory?

Boring!

@#34, Acacia: Where's the hypocrisy? I'm sorry but I just can't see it. What Brown does is to make use of a variety of psychological tricks on selected individuals in controlled circumstances and package them with some nice presentation and misdirection to give the impression that he's capable of doing far more than he actually does. In other words, he does his job well.

Were you also offended when you found out that Fargo wasn't based on a true story even though it said so at the beginning of the movie?

@#31, Hamstu: The first part is real and he uses a series of cues to program the woman to stop after 5 paces. One obvious example is when he repeatedly uses the phrase "stopping days to Christmas" instead of "shopping", and there were probably several unseen things to suggest 5, such as tapping on her back. The second part is much simpler - the girl on the street is a stooge - and it only works because of the credibility generated by the first part.

@#30, Acacia: He's a showman, he's supposed to make absurd pychological claims.

@#2, FreeLikeGNU: Legality isn't the issue in this case, it's the "Photoshop-capable" bit: there's no support for pressure sensitivity in Photoshop on linux under WINE, and this is a pressure-sensitive tablet...

@#17, Netsharc: TSA staff are rigorously trained professionals. It doesn't matter how blonde or how pretty you are, if you show up at US Customs with a passport from an obviously made-up country, you're going to jail.

@#5, Stephen: You're over-reaching with the cellphones stats. Firstly, there is a world of difference between "serious medical harm" (your phrase) and "clinically important interference" (the phrase used in the report). Secondly, the same team at the Mayo clinic carried out a subsequent study in 2006, with cases of interference of any type adding up to a grand total of 0.

Joel, while it's commendable that you point out that you haven't read the piece you're talking about, given that a large proportion of your colleagues/competitors would happily gloss over that particular detail, is there any particular reason why you decided to skip it? I mean, it's the first thing Gruber links to in his piece, so it's not like it was hard to get hold of.

@#3, Tensegrity: That's no zombie. He's clearly suffering from the industrial disease Vibration White Finger, presumably as a result of excessive practice.

While this does have a certain farcical quality about it, I don't think the lawyers were necessarily being over-cautious.

If, as DarrylB says, a subscription is required for shared remote access, then a WD server is obviously in the loop during data transfer. That means WD would be at least as liable to legal action as a torrent tracker if they didn't cover themselves.

Teresa, so what is actually happening? Are there hordes of people who download movies from Mininova, watch them, and then scoot over to Blockbuster to rent them?

Cory, there's no mention in the Techdirt piece about paying for the right to rip, there's merely a reference to paying for the presence of an extra iPod-ready file on the disc.

In fact, nothing about this proposal changes the right to rip (or lack thereof) in any way, shape or form. So what are you talking about?

@#1, Kit10 in Dublin: That's not pain, it's death. Both of them wear the tell-tale rictus grin that comes from hasty embalming.

@#1, Wil9000: The AAU is the Amateur Athletic Union, and they were important in the 1970s because they got to decide who qualified as an amateur, and hence who could go to the Olympics. Presumably a large wad of cash helped them overcome any qualms they might have had about plastering their logo on the box and implying that use of such stylish apparel was no bar to Olympic qualification.

My view is that the product would have been more successful if the manufacturers had approached a couple of ass doctors for quotes to stick on the box and re-branded the pants as a hemorrhoid treatment.

The design element theory occurred to me too, but it doesn't seem too likely, otherwise it would have happened across the board and not just in the German version.

I think they just put five star graphics in as placeholders and then forgot to swap/remove them.

Of course it's a symbiotic relationship: for the sacrifice of a modest increase in effort the lamp receives the protection of the camera by way of a deterrent to bulb thieves. It's exactly analogous to the relationship between swollen thorn acacias and acacia ants.

@#4, Mike Overbo: Well, what you're talking is more back-filling than a pitch, with the tacit prefix "I'm not a moron for handing over an obscene sum of money for this gizmo because it does...".

However, it does make me wonder how many product features are designed with a view to the selling process rather than pure usability. For example, I have a Toshiba LCD TV which has a DNIe (some kind of dynamic noise reduction/contrast enhancing filter) button in a prominent position to the left of the zero button. You might imagine that this toggles DNIe on and off, but you'd be wrong: it toggles a split-screen demo of DNIe and nothing else.

How about 'talk-through'?

@#5: Well, there's still product placement, but mainly it's of interest to advertisers because it shows that if you're looking to target a certain demographic with disposable income then it wouldn't be the worst idea in the world to stick your commercial alongside this show when it gets broadcast the old-fashioned way.

It ought to be possessive, but needn't be so unless you slavishly adhere to Fowler's grammatical commandments. Fused participles are perfectly acceptable where they look or sound better unless this leads to ambiguity.

There are plenty of instances in which it is inadvisable or impossible to make the noun possessive (try justifying the phrase "What are the chances of that's happening?" or finding a possessive form of "some of them", for example).

In this instance, no ambiguity is created by removing the apostrophe, and when it comes to grammar I would venture to suggest that less is most definitely more.

@#3, Crash: It's worth bearing in mind that an electric vehicle is unlikely to require the same range as a gas powered car, so your calculations may in part be moot.

In their current form, battery cars are impractical over long distances anyway because you can't as yet charge a battery in anything like as short a time as it takes to fill up a gas tank.

In an urban setting, gas powered cars still need a decent-sized tank because you have to go to a gas station to refuel, whereas batteries don't because (at least in theory) you can plug them into a power outlet whenever you park them.

@#22, The Other Michael: You're missing the point. It would patently be frivolous to claim that this isn't worthwhile merely because it could have been written 16 years ago.

However, the fact that there's no mention of this combined with a headline describing a state of affairs that hasn't been true for well over a decade indicate that Mark didn't even accurately represent the most salient facts contained in the piece he linked to. I'd say that's certainly worthy of criticism.

@#38, RealCatholicMen: The Jack Bauer gambit! And not a moment too soon. That'll shut these whining liberals up.

@#31, OsiNoche: I do hope you're not claiming to speak for the US Army National Guard. One weekend a month my ass.

@#22, Yurei: It is indeed depressing to think that a country with a human rights record as deplorable as Saudi Arabia was certified by President Bush as an ally in the 'war on terror' on October 19th of this year.

Or were you trying to say something else entirely?

@#4, Kevitivity: I'd prefer to know what terms like 'handful' and 'high value terrorist' actually mean before leaping to the the conclusion that it's important to note a sentence containing them. Do you know?

Presumably there's a cut off point at which the value of the terrorist is so high that 'this kind of treatment', as your charming euphemism has it, is no longer of any value. How else can one explain the absence of it during the interrogation of, say, Saddam Hussein?

@GabrielM: The minimum score increment/decrement in the game is 10, so no trailing 9s.

As for why it doesn't go up to 99990, it's because the right hand digit only has the elements necessary to make a 1. The reason why is possibly to save some screen real estate to the right of the one, but the most likely reason is that they simply recycled the layout of a 12-hour, 4 digit LCD watch display, which only requires a 1 in the first number position.