It's the same in London. Nobody challenges the teenagers who do this, on the off-chance that they are carrying knives and consider such a challenge to be "disrespec'". So whenever you board the top deck of a bus, chances are there's a posse of young thugs marking their territory with gangsta rap blaring tinnily out of their mobile phones.

Besides which, the English pint is only used in Britain (in Europe, at least). In France, they drink beer in (IIRC) 500ml measures (Europints?). In Italy and Spain, a regular glass of beer is 200ml and a large one is 400ml.

@Enochrewt: Mind you, most Britons drink Stella, Carling or Fosters, rather than fine ales. I suspect that cheap lager is a worldwide universal.

Btw, what is the definition of an American pint? It seems slightly smaller than the 568ml of the British one.

Wouldn't this be overkill? Surely a sledgehammer, a bucket of acid, or an incinerator would do the job as well for a fraction of the cost.

Perhaps they should have put him on the sex offenders' register, you know, just in case. Sort of like the guy who was arrested for having sex with a bicycle in his hotel room. After all, he did photograph some children and we don't know for sure that he wouldn't molest any children, do we?

For God's sake, won't someone think of the children!

Australia, being a democracy, recognises the right of individuals to protest peacefully in private, as long as their protest does not affect anyone else.

I'm half expecting social services to attempt to take her kids away from her on the grounds of her being an "unfit parent". Which would be insane, though not much more insane than denying someone custody of their children because they took part in SubGenius art performances.

I don't think this is about eliminating fair use in America (though the MAFIAA undoubtedly get hard-ons thinking about the possibility), but rather about ensuring that countries that have been forced to adopt DMCA-style laws by the WIPO treaty and are now looking at adopting fair-use-like doctrines to counterbalance them don't do so.

@10: A 1.3 megapixel, cellphone-sized CCD is going to produce pictures that look like crap; it has fewer pixels, and they're tiny ones, with lower dynamic range and higher vulnerability to noise, than in a compact camera. Anyone who bought something like this to take effortless vacation photos would end up disappointed.

Interestingly, the page doesn't show any sample images taken with this unit. I wonder why that is.

It sounds like something out of the former Soviet Union, where the well-connected could obtain special number plates that exempted them from traffic laws.

Not only that, but some houses are now worth less than their copper pipes, what with the price of metals rising.

It seems that every new film format was another attempt by the camera companies to charge customers more for less actual film. This is the turd-in-a-can ideal of consumer capitalism writ large.

My guess: the Daily Mail.

My first thought was that it's probably a CO$ black-op to implicate Anonymous. But looking at Anonymous' history of griefing people (singling out victims and coordinating people across the world to send credible death/rape threats to them), it looks a lot murkier than that.

What if the rabbit hole goes deeper, and getting Anonymous to start an anti-Scientology protest, and encouraging that to become, in the eyes of the public, the face of opposition to Scientology, was actually engineered by the CO$ as a way of discrediting their critics, getting the moral high ground and undoing some of the damage to their image that Tom "the Superclam" Cruise's increasingly bizarre behaviour has wrought? If so, they timed it well, allowing the protests to get a lot of publicity, until Anonymous became synonymous with anti-Scientology, and then waiting for something like this to happen.

Given that it's from MEMRI, I'd wager that there was a good deal of selective editing involved to present an appositely backward view of those awful Arabs, and take it with an appropriate quantity of salt.

Then again, if Damian Thompson's "Counterknowledge" is to be believed, the Islamic world is rapidly overtaking the Christians in the creationism/intelligent design stakes, so it wouldn't surprise me if the world centre of platygaean thought had shifted to somewhere in the Middle East.

Could this be the Night of the Broken Glasses? (Do Mexican emo kids wear those?)

There won't be any need for this. In the future, all schoolchildren will, by law, be immunised against the pleasurable effects of drugs.

Am I the only person reminded of Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin?

Do they sell these in any bricks-and-mortar shops in the Bay Area?

You see plenty of Ugly Australians as well. They're the ones drinking their weight in vodka, cracking onto every remotely available-looking female and passing out in the gutter at 3am, only to do it again the following night. That and the British stag-party tourists all over Europe's historic centres.

From what I've seen, the Americans who bother to get passports and go abroad tend to be fairly thoughtful.

As they say in Jamaica, "this be righteous dub, mon"

Was Freemasons goofing around with novelty goats a uniquely American phenomenon? I got the impression that, at least in the British Empire/Commonwealth, they were a more sober-minded lot.

I'm wondering how this font is implemented; IIRC, both TrueType and PostScript Type 1 implemented fonts as monochromatic vector outlines. Does OpenType support multicoloured fonts these days? Is there a technology for creating high-resolution coloured bitmap fonts? Or is this "typeface" a series of images rather than an actual usable product?

Here in London, there are two classes of products which are historically promoted as "American", with America being the gold standard: cosmetics and fried chicken. In the former case, one sees "American Nail Salon" shops and such here and there; perhaps it dates back to the years following World War 2, when Britain still had austerity while the post-war consumerism boom was taking off in America, and consequently luxuries such as beauty products were associated with America.

As for fried chicken, pretty much any high street in any urban area in Britain that's even slightly down-at-heel is going to have a fried chicken shop named after some aspect of American culture. The stereotypical one is a KFC knockoff, named after some other random US state ("New Jersey Fried Chicken", anyone?), but there are others too, like "Kennedy Fried Chicken", "Dixy Fried Chicken", "Hentuky Fried Chicken", and so on, usually with mascots such as cartoon chickens wearing cowboy hats. Most of them are Muslim-run and advertise their halal status. I once saw one which claimed that the chicken was "cooked to an authentic recipe from the Rio Grande" or something similar.

On a similar note: I saw this bag of toffee in a shop in North London. No idea where it originated; I'm guessing not America, though.

Perhaps someone should make a porcelain/plastic ceiling cat, somewhat like these:

http://www.tapplastics.com/applications/app_detail.php?aid=23&

All the peace-and-love stuff the Dalai Lama spouts is only in English, for the ears of gullible roundeyes. The stuff he says in Tibetan is a lot more bigoted and authoritarian.

I heard a rumour that he actually lifted a lot of his shtick for Western ears from another holy man, John Lennon.

Folk Goth and Death Folk sound like the likes of Current 93, Angels Of Light, or perhaps even Nick Cave's more rootsy output.

@Ill Lich:

"Folk" is music by people in rustic drag involving acoustic guitars. Much as "indie" is music involving electric guitars, and "alternative" is music involving electric guitars with lots of distortion.

The "folk" thing is becoming quite stylised, and is on the cusp of being thoroughly mainstreamed. We've been seeing hipsters with rustic-looking beards for about 5-10 years now, Threadless is full of T-shirts with woodsy motifs, quoting The Wicker Man soundtrack has become a cliché, and now adult-pop coolhunter Goldfrapp (she who went from dinner-party trip-hop to electroclash when the wind changed) has turned on a dime and released a "folk" album (titled Seventh Tree; perhaps UK fringe-folk outfit Voice Of The Seven Woods should have a word?). Goldfrapp has made her career by finding profitable trends on the fringes and repackaging them for an aspirational mainstream audience, sort of like a more yuppie Madonna. As such, quoting American/British folk-music symbolism is about to become as overexposed as "indie" and "alternative" before it.

What could be next? Eastern European/Balkan folk is still a step ahead; whilst beards and guitars may be mainstream, the industry has yet to figure out how (or why) to sell the wild-and-oddly-melancholy jollifications of slivovitz-fuelled Balkan gypsies (or the avant-gardeists who pretend to be them); currently there's Beirut and Final Fantasy, who are firmly ensconsed in the Pitchfork hipster ghetto. After that domino falls, perhaps there's Tuvan throat singing?

I think it's the falsetto vocals, the less-polished-than-the-mainstream sound (sounds familiar), as well as the beards and the pastoral/rustic/tribal/"rootsy" motifs occurring in lyrics (and band titles; look at all the bands mentioning wolves/birds/horses/bears in their names or album titles).

It's not folk in the Smithsonian Folkways sense of the word, though some acts wear the symbols of yesteryear's folk music more or less sincerely than others.

@License Farm: My guess is :

Freak folk = hippies on hallucinogens
Antifolk = hipsters on cocaine

Does it mention the CocoRosie racism controversy?

The Depeditator strikes again?

I never understood the need for rice cookers, when it's simple enough to cook rice in an ordinary saucepan.

The technique I use: pour in the requisite quantity of rice, rinse it, then add water until there's about a thumbnail's worth covering the rice, then boil until the water has evaporated from the top, after which turn down to a low heat and cook for five more minutes. It's not exactly rocket surgery, and the quality of results (generally excellent) is good enough that devoting money and bench space to a dedicated rice-cooking gizmo seems superfluous. Is there something I'm missing?

K Records artist Mirah's last album, if I recall correctly, was a set of songs from the points of view of insects, about appropriately insectile themes. Perhaps they should talk?

Although the current members are all men, women are not excluded, as Barney Jones points out: "Princess Leia helped them out a lot."

They don't say...

In line with Thatcherite-Blairite monetarist ideology, Heathrow Terminal 5 is designed to funnel passengers to retail shops and cafes, and to maximise revenue-extracting opportunities. It's surprising that there is anywhere to sit down there without being obliged to pay for an overpriced coffee or cake (though the ratio of retail to non-retail space is far greater than at the older terminals).

Stefanor: Britain introduced its current plugs (known as BS1363 ) in the early 1960s; as far as I know, they were never adopted by South Africa (which uses the 15 amp variant of Britain's earlier BS546 standard). They are used in Singapore and Hong Kong, and I've seen one at Dubai airport.

Actually, the South African outlet type differs from the British one, having large, round pins (like a larger version of the pre-1960s British outlet, sometimes still used for lighting in hotels). Or so the South African travel adaptors for sale in shops would have me believe.

I went to the Tenori-On launch in London in 2007; Toshio Iwai spoke, presenting a history of his interactive music/art projects. It was quite interesting; he had been working in a similar field since the late 1980s/early 1990s, though most of his works were installations in galleries, and Electroplankton and the Tenori-On were the first two works of his that were actual consumer products.

There were demonstrations of the Tenori-On in action, as well as tethered demo units. I got to play with one; it was fun, though probably the sort of thing one would play with for a while and then put aside. One would have to be quite rich to spend £600 (the asking price) on one.

If there's enough of a market, maybe some Chinese company will do a cheap, cool-looking and largely unusable knockoff, à la the "Vii" videogame unit. Then again, China has its own high-tech art scene which has leveraged cheap manufacturing (coming up with things like the Buddha Machine); perhaps someone will come up with some ridiculously cheap device with a touchscreen, a sound chip and firmware that makes it do cool things?

I've been through US airports three times last year (entering in San Francisco, flying to Seattle, and then flying out to London), and I haven't had anything stolen or broken. When I entered the US, I was half-expecting to be given the third degree and/or threatened with deportation to Gitmo by some humorless asshole in mirrorshades, but the experience was anticlimactically much like entering the UK or Australia; the immigration agent was professional and polite and the process took a minute or so.

I'm now wondering just how extraordinarily lucky I must have been.

Is process Media connected to the Process Church? Aren't they the guys who regard Charles Manson as a prophet/spiritual leader?

This may be a crazy thought, but what if this is a feint? Would there be any way in which they could publicly claim that the bill is off the table until late January, and then, when everybody has stopped looking, rush it through, or staple it to another bill, or what have you?

Will it be based on American McGee's gothed-up Alice video-game?

I once saw one of the numerous halal fried chicken shops in England (not sure if this was in London or elsewhere) advertising that their chicken was "cooked to an authentic recipe from the Rio Grande" (or something similar). Which evokes images of cowboys frying chicken over campfires (because that's what they did, right?)

This is not the first time this has happened; two years ago, a French restaurant in Taiwan listed cheesecake as "wikipedia".

How much do you want to bet that the founders of The Pirate Bay will end up renditioned to Gitmo in this fashion pretty soon? (TPB can, after all, be construed to be a non-state actor waging economic war against the US.) There probably are CIA teams watching them as we speak.

I wonder how much the UX (and their early exploits, the catacomb parties in the 1980s) were an influence on the "troglodistes", the underground guerilla frogmen in Jeunet and Caro's film Delicatessen.

boyd's law could be avoided if social network services had the ability to compartmentalise information according to audience. Some systems do this (LiveJournal, with its discreet group-based filters, is an excellent example, and Flickr has a more rudimentary version of this concept, with two hardwired "family" and "friends" groups). How long until someone applies this to a generic social-network service?

See also: http://dev.null.org/blog/archive.cgi/2007/11/27#1316_whyfacedo

Kevin Barnes on why selling out is impossible.

He's the John Galt of Indie Rock. Word.

Another demonstration that truth is not a democracy.

I once heard a rumour about some hardcore potheads, who had developed a tolerance to the effects of cannabis, spiking their joints with horse manure for an extra buzz. Perhaps that's where the term "shithead" came from?

I'm sure Atari won't die for good; as before, someone will buy out their trademarks, rename themselves Atari and start using the brand to sell games (or flash drives à la Commodore, or hipster apparel or what have you).

#2: there's a commercial SID-emulating softsynth for OSX and Windows named reFX QuadraSID; it has extensions such as envelopes, modulators and a mini-sequencer, and even has soundbanks by C64 music luminaries such as Chris Huelsbeck and Rob Hubbard. If you prefer Nintendo sounds, Japanese electropop group YMCK have released a free softsynth based on the Famicom's sound chip, at http://www.ymck.net/english/download/index.html

#16: you can use VST plugins under Logic, with the addition of a third-party VST to AudioUnit adaptor. fxPansion make one, which is a commercial product. I've been using it and it works rather nicely.

Could the "Don't Ask" one refer to the secret weapon that was meant to turn enemy soldiers gay?

Are we talking about Weimar-style runaway hyperinflation here, or merely a recession?

With the US dollar being fairly weak these days, would there be much point in waiting for the UK version?

Isn't the OpenMoko Neo1973 coming out in consumer format (i.e., with GPS functionality, which the developer model lacks) in December or January? I'm very much tempted to buy one when it does.

If any country has the expertise required to enforce such a law effectively, it is Germany. Perhaps they can rebuild the Stasi as a branch of GEMA?

Actually, Received Pronunciation is not quite the same as a "posh" English accent; RP is also known as "BBC English", because it was the default accent of BBC announcers in decades past. A posh accent is more like how the Queen used to speak, and is even further exaggerated. One can think of the differences as being between a business suit and a tuxedo.

That being said, neither the Queen nor BBC announcers now speak as they used to; class not being what it used to be in Britain, they have, in both cases, moved towards a generic middle-class accent closer to "estuary English" (i.e., the generic London accent).

I once had a Taybeh (at the Porterhouse in London, where they have about 200 beers from all over the world), along with an Israeli beer whose name I forget. They were quite similar.

Upon reading the bottle, I was disappointed to find that the Taybeh was actually brewed in Austria.