There is an extraordinarily rare genetic disorder called fatal familial insomnia which leads to an inability to sleep and then death in about a year after initial symptoms for those who inherit the gene (though it tends to kick in later in life).

"They watch films like . . . “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”"

I am fairly certain that "The League of Extraordinarily Bad Filmmaking" is unwatchable.

"How was he able to discuss it with the EFF?"

Because they were acting as his attorneys.

The iLiad has always been a great option -- just ridiculously expensive.

However...

"Extra points: unlike the Kindle, it's actually available in Europe. But without the killer feature of Amazon's perpetual cellular connection to its archive of digital literature, what's the point,"

Um, why would you want to waste your money on the DRMed crap Amazon is shoveling? I got a Kindle back when they went on sale last year and have yet to visit their online Kindle portal -- DRMed books FTL.

"The exercise-while-desk-jockeying initiative is a valiant idea for a sedentary age, but despite assertions to the contrary by the companies selling gizmos, it's actually harder to concentrate on that spreadsheet when your heart rate has popped your eyeballs out of their sockets and a miasma of your own foul drippings has turned your screen jaundice-color."

Riight, because you can't set a treadmill for a slow speed....

Personally, as someone who likes to pace back and forth when I'm working, these sound awesome. I just can't imagine the market for this is very big.

The bouncing ball, however, is lame.

Since increases in oil supply are outpacing increases in oil demand in recent quarters, this is almost certainly a speculative bubble that will soon burst and oil prices will drop

@34 wrote:

"Please read about necklacing and the ANC's position on it, rather than believing the sensationalist newspapers/blogs you obviously use as "reliable" sources of information."

The ANC's position on necklacing is very mixed. Yes, they denounced it, but it's also true that Oliver Tambo waited almost two years from the start of the necklacing to do so. OTOH, necklacing is something that would not have happened without the perverse nature of apartheid -- when people do not have access to legitimate authority, they will create their own authorities and we should not be surprised when these are filled with injustice and inhumanity.

You can also see the sort of blinders that some ANC leaders clearly developed with today's example of Thabo Mbeki's ridiculous statements in support of Robert Mugabe (just the other day Mbeki said there was no crisis in Zimbabwe) among other things Mbeki has championed.

Clearly, the ANC's decision to resort to violence in the 1960s worked and was probably the group's only real option. But the ANC paid a terrible price for that.

@18 wrote:

"The ANC was a terrorist organization... Apartheid was wrong, but Mandela's original approach was to use violence against innocents at a train station by planting bombs. That's why he was sent to prison. (He obviously shouldn't be on the list any longer)"

This is only partially accurate. The ANC was started in 1912 and tried peaceful nonviolence for decades. But nonviolence is only an effective strategy when you can shame your opponent -- nonviolence doesn't work against fascists who are willing to slaughter innocents and damn public opinion.

The Sharpville Massacre in 1960 made it perfectly clear that the South African government was willing to stomach any atrocity in order to maintain apartheid. It was only after the Sharpville Massacre that the ANC formally created a military wing with Mandela at its head.

I think it is very difficult to look at the ANC's position in 1960 and classify them as a terrorist organization. Black South Africans were completely excluded from meaningful political participation and violently attacked by the government. WTF other option did they have? If that's not a case where violence is morally permissible even with the full knowledge that inevitably innocents will be killed, it is hard to think of any situation that is.

Theresa wrote,

"Tom, every Quaker and U.U. that's got a Bible has a holy book with passages in it that are more than a match for the ones you've quoted. I own several Bibles, and at least one Koran. Does that mean you can explain everything I do in terms of their most objectionable passages?"

That is an extremely disingenuous response as Tom's ire was clearly aimed at people who have "faith" in the stories in those books as the revealed word of a monotheistic god.

Ummm...why did @25 get disemvoweled? Is quoting from nutty monotheists to make fun of them now verboten at Boing! Boing! unless the nutty monotheist is named Hagee?

I'm surprised no one has pointed out that aside from the mental anguish the child probably felt being taken away from his parents, in Michigan children in the care of the state are themselves in significant danger fare well

"(* except of course when it doesn't, and you spend 6 hours editing your xorg.conf to try and get two monitors to work)"

I lucked out because I had an nvidia card, but using nvidia-settings it took about 10 minutes and a couple reboots to get dual monitors to work perfectly. I was also impressed that Ubuntu recognized the obscure SATA card outofthebox that I spent about a week before I could get it to work in Windows.

Still not quite ready to ditch Windows altogether, but 8.04 gets me a lot closer.

Someone needs to create a SteampunkOrNot.Com site

"Every time I hear about Ubuntu, I hear the Talking Heads song Still Waiting. As in, still waiting for Cory to write his long...ummm...awaited review of Ubuntu."

LOL.

"Miliband's rhetoric, however reasonable, just creates support for Mugabe. And, honestly, why is it the UK or anyone else's business. Adjacent African nations are involved because they have to pick up the pieces."

Well, that approach has certainly proven its merit in the Sudan. Oh, wait...

@13 ... perhaps, but Saddam Hussein also held elections and the Bush admin supported the coup against Chavez a few years ago.

I also wonder if given how important an ideological movement democracy is whether dictators aren't engaging in self-deception. They *want* to believe they are the expression of the people's will. Even transparently undemocratic "elections" may help them to maintain that facade.

File sharing FTW.

@8 "I don't get it. Why does Mugabe need to win an election? His reputation wouldn't get any lower if he suddenly declared himself dictator."

It is an interesting question -- why do dictators since the 20th century at least go through the appearance of having elections?

I suspect UCLA PSCI prof Barbara Geddes is on to something when she argues that they do it in part as a break on the military (who are frequently the major threat to dictators,

I hypothesize that authoritarian leaders create and use parties and hold elections, despite the risks and costs of doing so, because they help to solve problems of intra-regime conflict that might otherwise unseat them. I suggest that dictators create and use parties primarily to counterbalance the power of the military. Because of its control of weapons and men, the military is always a potential threat, especially to dictators who have arisen from the officer corps themselves. A mass party organized to support the dictator or the regime decreases the likelihood of public acquiescence in the overthrow of the dictator because party militants have both an interest in mobilizing popular protests and the kinds of networks that make quick mobilization possible. Parties provide their militants with benefits that give them a stake in the regime. The same logic applies to elections. Elections are routinized, predictable, and less risky means for authoritarian rulers to demonstrate popular support, or at least acquiescence, and thus to deter challenges from intra-regime rivals. The paper uses simple game theory to show the logic of party creation from the dictator’s point of view.

It's probably also a good way to demoralize the opposition in Mugabe's case. It's a constant message of "you can't win" and allows Mugabe to openly defeat his opposition (and, likely, reduce somewhat its appeal if, for example, people who might otherwise be tempted to support it conclude that their taking risk for basically zero chance at a positive outcome).

"And I thought campaigning in Pennsylvania had gotten rough."

The odd thing is there is, to my knowledge, only one national-level U.S. politician who has publicly defended Robert Mugabe's regime (there are some morons at the state and local level in some areas that have expressed support for Mugabe).

And, what is truly odd, that person is currently the clear favorite to win the Green Party nomination for president.

Can't wait to start seeing McKinney '08 bumper stickers.

@16 ... thanks for the link.

@40 ... Jms Lwn hs sm ntrstng pnts, bt ltmtly h's jst rgng fr rplcng n pltclly slntd vrsn f hstry wth nthr pltclly slntd vrsn f hstry (nmly, n tht s clsr t hs prsnl pltcs).

Ww, nvr thght 'd fnd s mch spprt fr hypthtcl brtn bmbrs mng BB cmmntrs. ts lk wtchng th nrd vrsn f "Sldrs n Th rmy f Gd."

"I've been in a seminar taught by Bill Ayers. He's a very nice (and now much older man) who made mistakes as a young man. That a lot of you are trying to define him by what you've read in an article about one very small portion of his life is somewhat appalling."

Except Bill Ayers doesn't think setting bombs was a mistake. So, defining him by that seems very appropriate.

Sure, but there is a continuum of reckless lawbreaking acts that put people at risk--everyone who tries to outrun the police in a police chase is putting people at risk, as is everyone who drives when drunk, yet I wouldn't put these people in the same permanent outcast category as murderers who fully intended for people to die.

Lk, f y thnk ppl wh blw p brtn clncs whn n n s n thm shld nt b prmnntly tcst frm scty, 'm crtnly nt gng t prvnt y frm ssctng wth thm r hvng t nd crmpts t thr hm.

I take the opposite view, that in a free society people who engage in acts of violence in an effort to deprive others of their rights should be permanently ostracized by polite company, *especially* when they are completely unrepentant. Not only does Ayers, for example, not thing he was wrong but as he told the New York Times "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough."

That Ayers has been largely rehabilitated is itself a sad commentary (OTOH, the attacks on Obama are ridiculous given the tangential-at-best relationship between the two).

Does PETA hate people? Genre magazine did an article in 2000 in which they asked various people to name their favorite gay man of the 20th century.

PETA's Dan Mathews chose spree/serial killer Andrew Cunanan, because "he got Versace to stop doing fur."

Cunanan, of course, murdered Giannia Versace on the front setps of Versace's mansion before killing himself.

@79...couldn't disagree more. I don't own a gun (mostly because I'm cheap and good guns are expensive), but Obama's anti-gun position is an important issue. Obama's campaign has previously said he supports Washington DC's ridiculous handgun ban, and of course now is trying to wiggle out of that position.

Oftentimes the positions a candidate takes on these sort of issues tells us a lot more than the policy speeches that other people write and the candidates regurgitate. For example, you can learn everything you'd want to know about the lying control freak POS that is John McCain by following his late 1990s vendetta against extreme fighting events.

My $.02...take the money and run. Seriously, are you going to click on the Scientology or Microsoft ads? And if you think the ads have any affect on the content you *really* haven't been paying attention. Personally, I can't think of any better recipient of Scientology/Microsoft money than Boing! Boing! Tom Cruise should change his will to name BB as a beneficiary!

I run an anti-animal rights site (http://www.animalrights.net/) and every so often people would freak out because an ad from PETA or HSUS would show up there. Nothing like being financed in part by the same people you're trying to put out of business!

As in my case, I suspect Scientology would probably be more upset to learn where there ad money is going.

@14 wrote:

"Obama didn't "kick off" his state senate campaign at Ayer's place, it was just one event. But to go along with this analogy, what if the abortion clinic bomber had only set off the bombs at night when the clinics were expected to be empty, sending warnings in advance to try to ensure that no one happened to be in the building? What if this had happened decades ago, and the person had already served their time in prison? Unlike murder, I don't think destruction of property is the sort of crime that should forever make one an outcast from polite society."

Really? I think it would be the sort of crime to make one outcast permanently. Even if no one is in the clinic (which you can never be certain of) you are still putting lots of lives at risk. Emergency responders do get killed responding to incidents like this, and the point of the bombing is still to deprive individuals of their rights through terror and violence.

Presumably, if some wacko blew up your house you wouldn't think, "gee, I'm glad they were responsible terrorists who waited until no one was home."

@26 cited the following statistics:

"In the U.S. for 2001, there were 29,573 deaths from firearms, distributed as follows by mode of death: Suicide 16,869; Homicide 11,348; Accident 802; Legal Intervention 323; Undetermined 231.(CDC, 2004)"

*Legal Intervention*? Is that what they call it when they shoot some elderly grandmother at 3 a.m. in the morning because their CI lied about drugs being in the house? Wow, what a euphemism.

I'm waiting for the follow-up wherein we find that 34% of WoW player are still dateless losers who live in their mom's basement (and I say this as someone who has way too many days played on his rogue).

@19 wrote "I see the usual assortment of wingnuts are out in full force. Sad really."

Ah, the left-wing counterpart to the inanity that Mark rightly criticizes @6.

"One culturally pervasive principal that is at play in America is the merciless practice of dehumanization via labeling and name-calling. This form of basic human indignity turns people into objects to be manipulated, and trying to effect policy using epithets like “gay, “right”, “left” , “evil”, “criminals”, “freedom fighters, “terrorists.” etc."

And don't forget a favorite of the Left which Klein herself has used on several occasions -- scab.

The Observer had a review of Shock Capitalism that sums it up pretty well from a more liberal-left perspective.

I don't know if Klein is dumb or not, but it doesn't help that some idiot at Salon bills her as an economist in this video. That's like saying Ben Stein is a biologist.

Translation -- Comcast customer "service" is almost as bad as Userland's.

@2 ... much like when Winer ranted and raved that Google was censoring him because EditThisPage.Com pages were no longer being indexed by the search engine...until it turned out that EditThisPage.Com's server had been set up to return a "stop indexing us" message to Googlebot requests.

I dunno about the keyboard for any serious writing. I've got fairly small fingers, but that keyboard is hella tiny. Unless it really sucks, I'll probably go with the HP for the bigger keyboard.

Nice game, but I really thought the ball was OP. Could you nerf that? kthanxbai

Frankly, I'm not sure what Dery's thesis is. Dawkins and Hitchens are British atheists who aren't experts on American evangelicals? That's news? One could complain equally that Daniel Dennett (who does seem to understand American evangelicals a bit better, since he is an American) isn't an expert on Pakistan's Shi'ite sects.

Ironically, Dery seems to come close to saying what Dawkins and Hitchens do not -- that we really shouldn't take the evangelicals seriously. According to Dery,

"The Dawkins/Hitchens question---What's wrong with religion?---is far less illuminating than the question they might have asked: What are American evangelicals really talking about when they talk about religion? Following Tom Frank's argument in What's the Matter with Kansas?, I believe that Christian fundamentalism, American style (like its Islamic counterpart in the extremist madrasahs of the East and the Middle East), uses religion to articulate the social, political, and economic discontent and utopian fantasies of a certain segment of American society."

Frankly, if I were an evangelical I'd find *that* view far more demeaning. Ths s lk bm syng tht ppl clng t vrs vws nly s rslt f lngstndng cnmc cndtns. This trivializes what evangelicals really believe far more than do Hitchens or Dawkins' contempt.

For anyone interested, the New Yorker in 2002 published long, thorough piece on the Bolivia water war and privatization:

http://www.waterobservatory.org/library.cfm?refID=33711

And according to SercOnline.Com, about 15 percent the water supply in the U.S. is privately owned (measured by volume delivered/customers served): http://www.serconline.org/waterPrivatization/fact.html

"I've just watched Irena Salina's incredible, infuriating documentary FLOW: For Love of Water, a film about the often-invisible and underreported global water crisis. Ranging from widespread US contamination to the tragedy of developing nations who are forced by the World Bank to sell their water companies like Vivendi, Suez and Thames, who get sweetheart deals to offer substandard, overpriced monopoly water service, at terrible cost to human life.

Global water profiteering is at the center of a global healthcare crisis that kills more people than AIDS or malaria. The film shows the grim reality of water in Asia, Africa, South and Central America, and the USA. The mortality is awful, and not just from bad water or no water -- also from police forces in states like Bolivia who go to war against people whose water supply has been sold to foreign multinationals who are reaping windfall profits while they die. "

That just seems like a bizarre caricature, not a serious analysis. One can debate the merits of the World Bank's PPFIA but plenty of people were dying of malaria and other diseases thanks to water systems run by corrupt, inefficient kleptocracies long before the World Bank ever proposed private solutions to water in developing countries.

For example, the CBC has an interesting and more nuanced look at the realities of water delivery in Bolivia here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/features/water/bolivia.html

That being said, they need to privatize water from the bottom up, not the top down, though its hard for the World Bank and the kleptocracies to get to that point.

"Q. Aiiiiiiieeeeeeeeee! Boing Boing has advertising! Doesn't that mean you've become hopelessly corrupt?

A. You mean, unduly influenced by whatever advertisers are the source of the site's revenue? Don't worry about it. Boing Boing's editorial content is unaffected by its ads. "

Why is stuff like this in a post on moderation? Does this mean that claiming BB editors are influenced by advertisers is verboten?

Is there going to be a test on this later?

"Second answer: Because four years ago, Boing Boing's first, unmoderated comment system went so septic that it had to be shut down. The Boingers want to never go through that again."

Harumph! I liked the old system. I thought the main problem with that was people spoofing Xeni's userid. Other than that, it worked well.

"9. Dragging in one of those topics that's guaranteed to generate a huge thrash that goes nowhere, like gun control, abortion, or Mac vs. PC vs. Linux."

Only a gun-owning Mac user about to have an abortion would write something that supercilious!

"Do it while she sleeps?

If you're not sleeping with the mother of your alleged child, there is really not that much need for a test kit."

If you can get a cheek swab from a woman while she's sleeping, more power to you. I can't imagine not waking up during that sort of ... intrusion.

Interesting. Men are put in an odd situation...in most states if they want to legally dispute paternity they generally have a very short period of time to do so after the bith of a child. Miss that window and you're legally on the hook for the child even if you later learn you are not the father. (Of course, it doesn't work in reverse...you can be held legally responsible as the father long after the birth of the child has been born).

But, of course, "hey, you just gave birth, now lets do a test to see if I'm really the father" is not exactly going to win anyone any points either.

A discrete paternity test would be very helpful in this situation. But this product doesn't seem to solve the problem very much since, in order to be reliable, you need to get a cheek swab from the mother. How the hell are you going to explain that?

A better solution would be to bring laws regarding paternity into the 20th century. They're really predicated on the pre-DNA era where establishing paternity 100% was never really possible.

"Anyone who immediately puts down a film like this as "religious propaganda" might want to reevaluate their stance on evolution, especially without even seeing the movie(this is precisely why bloggers aren't viewed as press, by the way), since they clearly do not know either theory very well."

Well, the producers of the movie had a very active website presence where they push nutty views, so it seems fair to assume that the same nutty views that are on the movie's blog are likely to show up in the movie.

The interesting thing about banning Myers is that the blog for the film goes on and on about Myers and others being close-minded and not allowing a full and open airing of the creationist "argument." To turn around and then ban Myers from this screening of the film is a hilarious commentary on just how free and open the producers of the film really are.

Also, on Stein...the fascinating thing is that he's very conservative but he uses what is a typclly lft wng crtcsm f scnc -- that it is simply politics by another name. Stein argues on the documentary's blog, for example, that Darwin's theory was simply an extension and justification of British imperialism that can be largely dismissed as such.

Of course there is ongoing debate of just how scientific and accurate fingerprinting is. See this Lingua Franca article (PDF):

http://fp.bio.utk.edu/evo-eco/resources-this_semester/Cole-fingerprints.pdf

"5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor"

...but its okay to tell them that condoms cause AIDS:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/oct/09/aids

"So... any takers on a single act that will either simultaneously commit or directly lead to the commission of all new 7 deadly sins?"

Elliot Spitzer FTW.

Thanks for fixing the link. Notes make it sound like it was a fascinating talk. Yet another reason to end the embargo as it would only enable this "grey market" further.

This is simply amazing: "Took 11 years for video of Berlin wall to reach Cubans"

"Link to my notes" link isn't working.

Can't wait for future such talks. Maybe "Darfur DIY"?

"I'm worried that this will end up being destructive to imagination. When you describe a place verbally, the listener is free to fill in details. An inn, for instance, might have other guests there, a bard playing, etc. Until these are certain, they may or may not exist. You're free to create as little of the world as you need to. Someone asks "Is there a bard playing?" and you then decide yes or no as you see fit."

The problem is that right now the RPG industry is dying, so this is not a bad strategy to try to get new gamers in.

As SJ Games noted in their recent stakeholder report, it is non-RPG sales that are keeping alive most RPG-oriented game companies (in SJ Games' case, Munchkin is far more important to the bottom line than GURPS is).

http://www.sjgames.com/general/stakeholders/report08.html

@11 -- and the way to resolve that is to dismiss the first graph. Guns are not bad. Neither are violent videogames.

Wow -- all those comments and not a single person who noted that The French paradox is probably a myth. The French have serious obesity and heart disease problems:

See:

http://www.marininstitute.org/alcohol_policy/french_drinking.htm

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/20/the_skinny/main3280714.shtml

The group that sponsors this has a website here:

http://www.tccsa.tc/adventure/fair.html

and sells "home school creation science suppliments"

You also have to appreciate their tips for success:

Five things to remember:

1. Know your material.

2. Be Confident.

3. Communicate well.

4. Be thorough.

5. Pray your exhibit will witness to non-Christian visitors.

Um, I'm pretty sure that Legos have only extrinsic value, especially Star Wars Lego which generally only have value in relationship to your attachment to Star Wars and Legos (or, to use the cop's analogy, to they have value to the extent you are nostalgic about any number of things).

"I'd like a fast way to whip up some NPCs but I much prefer sitting at a table and playing than playing on a PC. I'll play WoW if I want to play on a computer."

Well, the tabletop RPG market is becoming increasingly marginalized. One the one hand that's great because there is an amazing variety of PDF downloads these days. On the other hand, the retail RPG business is pretty much dying.

Clearly, with the new D&D, WOTC is aiming to go after the WoW-playing folks and lure them into PnP RP with this sort of client-based system, electronic versions of the rulebooks, etc.

Frankly, I think it's going to end in failure. The PnP folks don't want to play WoW (or they already are, and they're going to play WoW for that experience, not use play the D&D client). The folks playing only are going to be underwhelmed.

Yes, there's a market for people who used to play PnP but can't anymore because of geographical issues, but there are already 4-5 different very nice programs in that space already and none of them have exactly set the world on fire.

1. Gerrymandering. Yes, the Republican gerrymandering in 2002 got a lot of national attention. Note, however, it was a response to Democratic gerrymandering that meant the Republicans didn't control the Texas legislature for *130 years*. This is the problem with gerrymandering, in general...it only suddenly becomes a problem when the "wrong" party starts to take advantage of it.

2. This is part of a long-running battle that goes back to the 1970s in Waller County on whether or not students should be able to vote in local elections in Waller County, or whether they should have to vote in the counties where they are permanent residents. This is an issue in many college towns. Regardless, Waller County has consistently ignored court orders, etc. that clearly require it to allow students at Prairview A&M to register and vote in Waller County.

@29... exactly... flagged as inaccurate. Nothing new has been released. Instead, this is just speculation about what limited info released 6 years ago means.

@25 "What good things come from payday loan companies?

If there are none, why do we allow them to exist?"

They provide money to people who need it right *now* and don't have any other way to obain it.

Look, suppose they're going to turn your power off *today* if you don't pay your overdue, and you don't have the money. As the Fed Reserve study I hinted at above illustrates, turning to a payday lender is not ideal but better than the alternative which is frequently writing checks that bounce. The reality is that frequently fines and fees from banks in many situations are *higher* than the payday lending fees.

@7 hits the nail on the head:

"We have these "UnBanks" here and the rates they charge for simple transactions are astronomical. I didn't have any other choice on the street though. There are also places that will let you "rent" furnishings at exhorbitant rates but you pay through the nose and never really own the furniture. It mat be the only option for some people though."

Hmm...so you didn't have any choice...so what would have happened if those placed had been regulated out of business?

Clinton and Schwarzenegger op-ed in WSJ on the problem and possible solutions to the "unbanked" problem here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120113610711211855.html

And a Federal Reserve study here comparing outcomes in states that allow payday lending vs. those that don't and finds that generally the former is preferable to the latter:

http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr309.html

@9...Jonah's article is stupid, but he didn't succumb to Godwin's law...rather he's claiming that critics of the Bush administration are reduce to that style of argument.

@10, in contrast, provides a reasonable objection to Goldberg's argument. Goldberg is essentially arguing that torture is okay as long as it only last for brief periods of time and is only done to Bad Guys(TM).

Goldberg is also rightly pointing out that torture has had bipartisan support.

He also glosses entirely over the effectiveness of waterboarding in producing reliable confessions. The evidence strongly suggests that waterboarding is so traumatic that people will confess to anything. See, for example, this ABC News report and the section about Ibn al Shaykh al Libbi's false confessions after being tortured by the CIA that had a direct impact on US actions in Iraq:

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=1322866

So we violate international law, provide an affront to human decency, and provide a tacit assent to torture by other regimes, all in order to extract information from suspects which the very nature of the interrogation makes it highly likely to be fabricated.

Yeah, it fills people with revulsion..its just wrong...like using anesthesia during childbirth, artificial insemination, and autopsies once filled people with revulsion.

It's just not natural!

@1 Not saying I agree with Hitchens, but he has for a couple years now been claiming that Castro's brother Raoul has engineered what is essentially a military coup in Cuba, and there is nothing in this announcement specifically that discredits that thesis. In fact, if anything, I imagine Hitchens will argue this just formalizes what has already been the case in Cuba -- Raoul and the military are in charge, not Fidel.

I'm not sure why anyone takes these yahoos seriously. Take Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan who Kotaku interviews for its piece and ends up scoring him as 60% accurate. Yet, Pachter is so clueless about the industry that he told The New York Times back in 2005 that World of Warcraft was just a fad,

"I don’t think there are four million people in the world who really want to play online games every month. World of Warcraft is such an exception. I frankly think it’s the buzz factor, and eventually it will come back to the mean, maybe a million subscribers.

It may continue to grow in China, but not in Europe or the U.S. We don’t need the imaginary outlet to feel a sense of accomplishment here. It just doesn’t work in the U.S. It just doesn’t make any sense."

Takuan wrote:

"so, does that mean video of a cop committing a crime in those jurisdictions is useless?"

That is a very good question. In Commonwealth v. Hyde, the Mass. Supreme Court upheld the conviction of an individual who taped a cop during a traffic stop. The recording came to light when the defendant went into the police station several days later to file a complaint against the police officer and produced the recording as evidence of the officer's alleged misconduct.

However, the Mass Supreme Court *has* said that simply because you're taping something that is obviously illegal doesn't mean it is okay to tape .. for example, you could not tape a kidnapper's ransom demands without violating Mass law:

"In Commonwealth v. Jackson, supra at 506, this court rejected the argument that, because a kidnapper has no legitimate privacy interest in telephone calls made for ransom purposes, the secret electronic recording of that conversation by the victim's brother would not be prohibited under G. L. c. 272, § 99: "[W]e would render meaningless the Legislature's careful choice of words if we were to interpret 'secretly' as encompassing only those situations where an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy." Id.(7)"

See: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=ma&vol=sjcslip/8429&invol=1

@Pyros,

New Hampshire, Massachussetts, and Pennsylvania for startes. Those states an onerous statue that requires explicit consent by both parties to videotape. The cases I've seen where these laws have been invoked have always been by police not wanting to be videotaped during the performance of their official duties.

There's the Gannon case in NH, and of course, there was Peter Lowney's conviction in Boston for videotaping a police sergeant at a public political protest.

At a minimum, there should be a presumptive right to videotape anything within a public space. That this is not the case in all jurisdications is absurd.

Wow, a cop whose a bully. Next up -- it turns out the sky is blue!

I'm with @22...I know people who spend 30 hours a week playing a Tauren warrior...after pretending you're a cow for much of the week, carrying around a fake baby doesn't look all that odd.

Presumably if this had some bullshit Second Life connection or could be made into some sort of avante garde art project it would be cool, but since it's not I guess it's safe to laugh at these folks.

@126

"Facts:

It is not illegal to videotape cops."

Please don't show your ignorance. This is, sadly, not true in all jurisdictions within the United States.

Ate at an Outback Steakhouse once. It was a very hot summer and there was an air conditioner above our head and -- I'm not kidding -- condensation from the AC dripped onto my wife's plate. And the waitress said we just had to expect that in summer.

Never been there or any other Outback Steakhouse again.

"The Soviet Union has never existed and therefore is about as scary as the student union."

That made no sense at all. By the time I was born, Nazi Germany hadn't existed for almost three decades but any regime that can murder people that efficiently is scary as hell, especially since the fall of the USSR has not necessarily led to liberal democracy in all of its former purview. Last time I checked, a former KGB operative still dominates Russia.

Um, something's wrong here. Last time I checked, this was still Boing! Boing!, and yet here I see a post referencing meta-humans without the obligatory "underwear perverts" reference.

Is BB slipping? Is this the result of some nefarious plot by the Legion of Doom? Tune in next week, for the next exciting post in the case of "The Missing Underwear Perverts."

"Parco said Merola continued to yell after receiving her food, demanding that Clearwater police Chief Sid Klein respond to the scene. He pleaded with her to move for about 20 minutes, but she refused to budge, Parco said.

...

A McDonald's manager backed Parco's account, according to the report. Laura Nicholson said Merola refused to move her car, was rude to Parco and told the officer he could not arrest her."

Some idiot blocking the exit of McDonald's for 20 minutes while hurling insults at the cop trying to persuade her just to move her car...sounds like the cop is in the right here.

@24... agreed...it appears the Guardian is using the Devon story as a source and then adding its own unique embellishments.

Notice, for example, how the Guardian story makes it sounds like she's walking around New York in her pajamas trying to find her kids after leaving the hospital, whereas the Devon article is very clear that she tracked down her kids by making phone calls from her hotel room once she got back.

Also notice how the Guardian says the children were "strip-searched" but all the Devon article says is they were "frisked."

The Guardian story makes it sound like the girls were traumatized, whereas in the Devon story the mother is very nuanced. In fact it's interesting how little the Guardian actually lets the mother tell the story but rather summarizes the Devon article fairly selectively.

I call bullshit on the Guardian story. Certainly this wasn't what these three planned for vacation, but it sounds like the New York authorities kept the girls safe and well taken care of under rather surprising and extreme circumstances.

"Apple's "pay $20 for iTouch upgrade while iPhone gets a similar upgrade" free is pretty dumb also."

It's dumb, but Apple has to do that way because of the different methods they chose to recognize revenue from the iPhone vs. the iTouch.

"Could we have paid $30 - sure. But paying $30 to get around crippleware from a software update - on a feature that should have been free? Its abhorrent. Shame on Apple."

And trying to actually buy it is a nightmare. I needed to purchase a copy for a tax exempt institution and had several Apple CSRs tell me they simply could not sell it to me without charging sales tax for my locale.

Think Different.

You know, there's this thing called Google...

Anyway, this doesn't have anything to do with Sarbanes-Oxley but rather with standard accounting practices, specifically SOP 97-2 which covers revenue recognition from software. As AIPCA notes here (http://www.aicpa.org/PUBS/JOFA/dec2007/software_revenue.htm), under SOP 97-2, if Apple offers free upgrades it has to alter how it recognizes revenue from sales (which it did with the iPhone):

Apple has disclosed in quarterly filings that it recognizes revenue from its new iPhone as well as the iPod and Macintosh computers under software revenue recognition rules. Apple will record all revenue and related costs of sales from the iPhone on a straight-line basis over the two-year estimated life of this product. Historically, many hardware companies might have recognized revenue upfront, at the time of the sale, from a product similar to an iPhone. However, Apple intends to provide iPhone users with free software upgrades, necessitating the deferral of revenue under SOP 97-2.

With the iPod touch and the previous brouhaha over the upgrade to the Apple wifi box, it is almost certainly recognizing the revenue upfront, which requires it to charge for any significant upgrades.

OOps...that should have said "check out *without* the birth certificate."

"They actually use this data for good, not evil. As I understand it, each bear has its own unique ID number. If someone loses their bear, and someone else finds it and turns it into the shop, the shop can look up that number, find the child's name, address, and phone number, and contact them to let them know that their bear is OK."

Hmm...so that's what they use it for. I'd like to know just how often someone loses a stuffed animal and someone not only finds it but returns it to a Build-A-Bear store. Seems fairly unlikely and a convoluted process for a lost toy.

My daughter loves Build-a-Bear but the counter clerk always gives us this strange look when we check out with the the birth certificate. And I'm always thinking, hey I just dropped $80 on a stuffed animal and accessories. If we don't want the birth certificate, let it go.

I've offered to let my daughter get the birth certificate, but she takes my view that it's a hassle because typically all of the computer stations are in use and she just wants to go play with the bear, not fill out electronic forms.

""Some commodities brokers are now betting on oil going to $200 a barrel within a decade."
IANACB, but I'd say their bet is a pretty safe one. I would be very, very surprised if oil didn't reach $200 a barrel within 5 years, in fact, much less in a decade.
And I have no idea what that means for food prices."

I'd say that's a very risky bet and will richly reward those investors planning on $200/barrel oil if that should come true (assuming, we're not talking about entirely inflationary changes in the nominal price of oil).

@18 wrote

"Food has been artificially cheap for a long time. I suspect reality is slowly creeping up."

Yes and no. Consider also that it is a lot harder in the food commodity market to react quickly to unexpected increases in demand. I suspect we'll see increases for the next 2-3 years as producers respond to the increase in demand by increasing production (which is already happening, just not fast enough), and then around 2010 you'll see a glut of food and a crash in prices.

Every 8 or 9 years there's an increase in food prices and people start wringing their hands about global starvation and ridiculously high food prices, but a market correction inevitably occurs.

That said, gov't action that distorts the corn market by encouraging its use for fuel is as boneheaded stupid an action as I can think of.

The summaries that Xeni posted are just stupid.

First, this proposal has been around in one form another for years and has nothing to do with terrorism.

Rather, it is designed to allow for tracking down any disease outbreak, such as foot-and-mouth disease, BSE, etc. (Google to see the problems the gov't had tracking the source of that BSE positive calf a few years ago).

If you Just Fucking Google It(TM), you end up at http://animalid.aphis.usda.gov/nais/index.shtml where you get a brief outline of the program which makes it clear that this is to track animal diseases not silly bioterrorism.

Of course an outbreak could be the result of terrorism. There have been animal rights activists who have threatened to expose U.S. livestock to foot-and-mouth...the disease rarely kills animals but ends up costing livestock farmers major $$.

"Lt. Mark Peterson of the State Patrol wouldn't describe the uncooperative behavior. Five troopers at the scene were placed on routine administrative leave while the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigates."

Got to have more time to make sure everyone has their stories straight

Somewhere, someone at Yahoo! is thinking...damn, they killed him before we got a chance to out him to the Chinese authorities.

@14 wrote:

GDP is a pretty rubbish measure of welfare--look at GDP ratings, where the US leads, versus the UNDP's Human Development Index, where failings in American education, social services, income inequality and healthcare put its apparent wealth in perspective. Incidentally, if Sen is put in charge of developing a new metric of welfare (not of "happiness"--that's something else entirely), it may well end up looking like the HDI, since Sen had a hand in its development as well.

But Sen has been pretty clear that HDI is intended as a way of more validly comparing the progress of developing countries...that it is not intended as a way to evaluate developed nations.

France's real GDP growth has been anemic and this seems like a fairly transparent attempt by Sarkozy to simply wish that problem away by simply introducing a different metric.

Also, Oleg Kalugin who used to head the KGB's counterintelligence org claimed that Agee approached the KGB in 1973 and offered to turn over a great deal of classified info to the KGB. Kalugin claims, however, that the Soviets distrusted Agee -- apparently thinking he was going to feed the misinformation -- and so didn't take up the offer.

A Cuban defector in 1992 claimed Agee was paid $1 million by Cuba. Agee had publicly thanked the Cuban Communist for its support while he was writing the book, but denied that he took any money from them.

Agee was apparently initially a dupe from the U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and then a dupe for the USSR/Cuban designs on the region.

I would just open the box. Whatever's in there can't be as bad as season 3 of Lost.

Hmm...the same Philip Agee who once told Newsweek,

"I support the Cuban revolution for the same reasons that I quit the CIA. In my experience, the U.S. doesn't give a shit about free and fair elections, and nowhere in Latin America has the power of the oligarchs been eliminated."

Yeah, because if you're looking for free and fair elections, the Cuban revolution is certainly the place to start.

"And don’t get me started on that terrifying hole that squeezes out more bags of meat."

Hmmm...is Ellis channeling Dave Sims these days?

"Marvel comics in particular has taken a median approach. They now offer all issues to date (for some of their series like X-Men, Hulk, Avengers and a number of other headliners) for sale on DVD-Rom. $50 for every issue of The Incredible Hulk might sound a bit steep but, if you like what you see in the trades it's a steal."

Except the quality is crap *and* DRMed.

And its not a steal, because in order to follow what's going on in X-Men you typically have to be reading other X books which are not included on the DVD-Rs.

Also, and this may just be me, some of these DVDs are burned on dual layer DVD+-R (8.xx gb) and I had to go to 3-4 different machines before I could find one that would actually read some of the disks.

"It is true that that the DVD collections that have been available until recently were at times of a substandard quality as far as scans go. However, they also included all of the adds and letter columns. These things are important in a historical aspect."

And if you go to the warez sites, typically you can find almost all comics in multiple versions, including cover-2-cover versions with ads, and versions with noads as well.

The illegal versions also offer a lot of things that the legit ones don't. For example, the X-Men DVD was the worst because with many of the more recent storylines you can't really follow them unless you also are reading a number of other books. So there are a lot of compilations that have every book you need to read in the correct order for massive crossover storyline X.

The thing about the DVD collections that featured 44 years of the Fantastic Four, etc., is that they were interesting but ultimately sucked compared to what you can download.

First, the scans, especially for older issues, were just crap compared to the sort of quality you see in the illegal versions on filesharing networks.

Second, the scans were in PDF format rather than cbr or cbz so that they could put DRM in there.

Third, the DRM was incredibly stupid. Basically the DRM involved a watermark that would appear if you printed the comics. Hello...the customer for this is the sort of person whose going to read the comics on their monitor, not print out thousands of pages (besides which the DRM is trivial to get around). Folks who want print are going to go with the trade paperbacks.

I would be really surprised, btw, if the download market has significantly affected retailers. I know I do spend less at my comic book store than I did 10 years ago on *comics*, but I'm spending far more than I should on action figures, t-shirts and assorted stuff (just as Marvel is making far more on its movie business than it is on the actual sales of comics -- there was a half-joking/half-serious idea floating around back when Spider-Man 1 was such a huge hit that Marvel would get out of publishing altogether and just do licensing because that's where its bread and butter is).

"Anybody have any experience with these? They appear to be new products, but are priced much more reasonably than the NetGear products. My experience with other Thermaltake products says they'll be reliable, as well (as far as hardware, PSU, etc, goes, not sure about the software that powers them)."

No experience with them, but the reviews are kind of blah on this device (see http://aphnetworks.com/reviews/thermaltake_muse_nas_raid/, for example)

The main problem, though, is that even though this is a 4 bay device, it doesn't support more than > 1.6tb of storage. So you can't, for example, throw four 500gb HDs in this sucker -- that's simply not supported.

Ugh.

"1) On a beach where it is somehow legal for a woman to be topless a man cannot take out his penis with no one in sight except the two of them when a topless gal asks him to! This is absolutely ridiculous."

The only thing ridiculous is this comment.

Both the man and the woman in this case have the same legal rights. Both can, should they choose, go topless. Neither, however, my expose their genitals.

Someone back there mentioned that this technique is based on the research of Paul Ekman. Ekman wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/27/AR2006102701478.html) advocating his techniques, but I'm not so sure he's the best advocate for his own ideas,

The man in the cheap brown jacket stood slumped in line, staring at the ground. His hands were fidgety, reaching repeatedly into his inside jacket pocket, or patting it from the outside. A momentary look of anguish, just 1/15th of a second or so, occasionally flashed across his face -- the inner corners of his eyebrows would go up, so that his brows sloped down from the center of his forehead, his cheeks would rise, and the corners of his lips would pull down slightly. He was exhibiting what I call a micro-expression, a sign of an emotion being concealed.

The question was: What was he concealing? And why?

To the behavior-detection officers I was with at Boston's Logan International Airport, his combination of mannerisms -- the micro-expression, the slumped posture, the pocket-patting -- was unusual enough to raise a red flag. They called a uniformed state police officer, who asked the man the purpose of his travel. It turned out that he was on the way to the funeral of his brother, who had died unexpectedly. That was the reason for the bowed head. The frequent chest-patting was to reassure himself that he had his boarding pass. The micro-expression was an attempt to conceal his grief.

Unless we harass people during their time of grief, the terrorists have won!

One of the reasons that people go to a store like Circuit City, rather than buying things on the Internet, is that they want to be able to talk to a knowledgeable salesperson.>

I have yet to enter a Circuit City or Best Buy and encounter this mythical "knowledgeable salesperson." I assume such sightings are to be classified in the same category as sightings of Bigfoot.

@38 JungleDisk is awesome as a backup solution. I've just a few hours away from fishing my massive 269gb backup of my important data files.

That said, at least in the United States JungleDisk is still slow for must of us because of the limited upload capacity that most of us have. I have a 10mbs/1mbs pipe to my home, which means I get about 720kilobits/second upload directly to S3 or around 8 gb/day I can upload. So that 269gb backup is 33 days assuming I get that throughput constantly, which is definitely not the case.

Also, S3 seems very susceptible to latency issues which cause frequent interruptions of the process, requiring one to start uploading the file that got interrupted over...which is a bit of a pain if you're at 997mb of a 1000mb file.

The JungleDisk folks have gotten around a lot of these problems with their new JungleDisk Plus product, but that does add some additional expense.

Still, overall I've been extremely happy with JD/S3 as a reliable off-site backup solution.

The ReadyNas product has gotten stellar reviews for years now. Its a shame that Netgear has jacked up the price on these...$850 for a diskless one on Amazon.Com? Holy crap, that's expensive.

I'm with @1 -- FFS standardize on mini-USB for charging portable devices. I was really annoyed that the Kindle has a mini-USB port but can't use it to charge -- instead it requires yet another separate charger that I have to buy two of (one for home, one for work).

"The former criticism is valid, I think, but only for that particular scenario. Unlike some, I've found the Kindle's large page turning buttons on the side to be very well placed and comfortable to use in a variety of positions. (I do question why there is a need for a "Back" button on the right hand side that performs a different function than the button on the left that flips back a page.)"

I agree. I find the page turning buttons are just fine. The Back button is extremely confusing in that I'm never quite sure where I'm going to go when I hit the Back button. Frankly, I think they could have just left this off and put a "Previous Page" button there.

"The shape of the Kindle itself is actually growing on me a bit. It's clear they wanted to try to create a shape that was iconic, and the shorn corners do make it slightly more comfortable to hold, although I'll concede they are mostly gratuitous negative space. The main problem with the Kindle's design is still the keyboard, which while usable, is not needed at all while reading books. Future versions should stash it away or make it virtual."

Hopefully not virtual. What they really need to do is just improve the keyboard. Its really crappy.

I think the biggest drawback still are some of the limitations of the software which hopefully they'll update.

For example, you can view un-DRMed Mobipocket files, but the author doesn't show up on the home page. I reported that and it appears likely they will fix that.

They also, however, need some sort of other organizational scheme than just authors and titles. I have about 500 books on my Kindle...scrolling by title/author just don't scale. They need to allow tagging/categorizing so I can see Nonfiction and Fiction and then go into Nonfiction and see History, Science, etc.

Other Mobipocket readers support that sort of scheme with no problem, so there's no reason the Kindle couldn't.

"However, an important point is that the person who found the bag had to walk past a uniformed police officer without reporting itin order to get arrested.

Personally, I would think a good samaritan would hand it to the first police officer they saw - why hold on to it? "

Police in large cities are not going to bother with every purse or wallet turned in. In fact, if they do that would seem to be a considerable misallocation of resources.

And as the story pointed out, there is absolutely no obligation to turn the wallet/purse in to police, even if one is standing next to you. The only legit busts they made appeared to be where they could tell someone had taken money out of the purse/wallet and then basically disposed of the bag/wallet. *That* makes sense.

The rest was complete bullshit.

@24 wrote:

"Looks like those bullies are employed now."

Yeah. Those folks who picked up the wallets to return them should just be thankful they weren't tasered.

Many years ago, a friend and I found a purse in the parking lot of a convenience store. Took it home, found the woman's driver's license, called her and she picked up the purse.

Since the purse contained a baggie with a considerable amount of marijuana in it, I got the feeling she was *very* happy that we had contacted her privately rather than taking the purse to the nearest police officer.

Don't cops in Rockdale have something important to do ... shouldn't they be out tasering someone??

Hey, the corporate folks are as knowledgeable as their in-store sales staff!! W00t, BB FTW.

"seriously what are you using 56 GB a month doing? Not that I don't think unlimited should mean unlimited but this begs the question."

A lot of things. I've gone over >1TB of usage in a month, with nary a complaint from my ISP.

And here I thought it was us Yanks who had crappy broadband options.

@14 wrote:

"People who design remote controls still don't get this. You still see remotes with dozens of buttons on them, and the designers probably know what each and every one of them does and makes a point of using them at home. Me, I just want to be able to pop out to the DVD menu when I get to a boring scene and to be able to back up and watch Kate Winslet take her clothes off in slo-mo."

...and my grandmother only does crossword puzzles. Literally the only books she ever buys are books filled with crossword puzzles. So she doesn't understand why the local bookstore has to stock 10,000 titles when all *she* needs is crossword puzzles.

@6 "I understand where he's coming from, but I'm not sure if it's entirely true. Too much choice can be overwhelming but, at the same time, too little is a bad thing too. I don't think the key is necessarily reducing/limiting your choice, so much as not worrying so much about whether or not you made the right one."

Exactly -- understanding when it is and is not important for *you* to limit choices is key. Swartz talks in his book about the difficulties of buying jeans at The Gap which he finds near overwhelming. I rarely spend more than a few minutes thinking about what clothes I'm going to buy/wear. If I do care, I will outsource that to someone else to whom this stuff actually makes sense (my wife).

On the other hand, my wife could care less as to which of the dozens of possible video cards are installed in her machine, whereas that is something I happen to know something about and care enough to actually pick a decent card at a decent price point.

Reason had a very nice critique of this paradox of choice view here: http://www.reason.com/news/show/36172.html

Outside the artificial constraints of a psychology experiment, people adapt pretty effectively to proliferating choices. We go back to our favorite restaurant and order the same dish because we know we'll like it. We find a toothpaste that suits us and stick to it. We don't always choose anew.

"Consumers tend to return to the products they usually buy, not even noticing 75% of the items competing for their attention and their dollars," writes Schwartz. "Who but a professor doing research would even stop to consider that there are almost 300 different cookie options to choose among?"

And who but a polemicist pursuing an argument would completely ignore what these habits tell us about the world? In a familiar environment, people aren't overwhelmed by choice. With experience, we learn to negotiate the alternatives. Schwartz may have trouble in The Gap, but a teenager who owns nine pairs of jeans doesn't. As Schwartz himself notes, "A small-town resident who visits Manhattan is overwhelmed by all that is going on. A New Yorker, thoroughly adapted to the city's hyperstimulation, is oblivious to it."

BTW, not to just dig on Paul...the scary thing is that compared to someone like Mike Huckabee, Paul is actually halfway sane and stable. And yet Huckabee is considered a rising candidate in the GOP primary who has a serious, if outside, chance .

It looks like, as usual, we'll have a Control Freak vs. Control Freak election next November.

"It's going to be fun watching Ron Paul go down in flames. I haven't seen a more inept campaign style in a long time. Why won't he close his ties to neo-nazi fund raisers?"

Going down in flames? That would assume he's actually "up" anywhere. The only place Paul actually seems to be winning anything is Internet polls.

Presumably Bruce Wayne never allowed racist statements to be made in *his* newsletter. And certainly Wayne would never have offered the lame excuse that he didn't even read much less produce the newsletter sent out under his name as an explanation of how racist statements ended up in there.

Why are the libertarian candidates who actually run for office such loons?

"Chris Comer was accused in the Nov 5 Memo of forwarding an email announcement of a presentation on science in violation of the policy to "not communicate in writing or otherwise with anyone outside the agency in any way that might compromise the transparency and/or integrity of the upcoming TEKS development and revision process." It is highly tendentious to interpret forwarding an email message from a group that "opposes teaching creationism in public education" to be a violation of this policy only because a staff member used her TEA email account, and also that this "implies endorsement" of the speaker and the speaker's position "on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral." This is a serious misinterpretation: by no means would simply forwarding an announcement of a science talk from a third party constitute TEA "endorsement" of evolution over Creationism or anything else"

SOP for creationists, though. As long as you ignore all the scientific evidence -- or prevent people from being exposed to it -- then you can successfully attack it. But if you actually urge people to go hear or read about evolution, well, that gets harder and harder to maintain.

"I think there are cool gifts that do things -- a computer, a bread-maker, a college fund for the child's education -- but jewelry is just for establishing social status."

Exactly, total f'ing snobbery here and in Joel's post.

Expensive gadgets -- good.

Expensive jewelry -- example of consumerism run amok.

I mean, no offense to the designer, but what exactly is a $120 *limited edition* (ooh) BB-branded jacket if not conspicuous consumption run amok!! http://www.gama-go.com/product.php?productid=16467&cat=260&page=1

I just think its a bit silly and self-righteous to go on about how wasteful and cynical, then, buying jewelry as a gift for a mother explicitly tied to said motherhood. Its like the attack of the geek fundies -- *our* consumption is okay because it fits our values, but *your* consumption is not because it doesn't fit well into our norms.

@Tom wrote:

"For the price of one of these bits of pretty rock you could feed an African village for a month, and who wouldn't feel an incredible pleasure knowing that in some miserable place life has been made a little bit easier in celebration of your new child?"

Yeah...and for the cost of one high end computer, you could probably do the same. Yet I don't seem to remember jeremiads against $4,000 computers. For that matter, why do you ever see a movie or do anything that is not absolutely necessary when people are starving somewhere in the world?

Yeah, I guess if they were part of the BB crowd it would have been something like a DVD copy of 2 Girls One, Cup! Seriously, I asked my wife and its not something either her or I would have been comfortable with, but if it makes these people happy, more power to them.

I also want to know where the gift for the men is. You know, insemination is tough work -- I could use a new graphics card!

Well, that was a bit of pretentious moralizing, Joel, unless you're going to attack our "consumerist" habit of giving expensive gifts to mark any number of other occasions. Does buying an expensive wedding ring denote that whatever else the husband does for his wife, that it won't be as important as that ring? Give me a break.

Give me a break that the movie studios are forcing poor Steve Jobs to do this. If the studios add a file to DVDs that can only be played on Apple equipment, that's a big win for Jobs at the expense of his competitors. Steve Jobs cares about as much for your ability to watch media in the way you want as the studios do. All Jobs cares about is beating his competitors, and if lock-in to his hardware is the way to do that, he's shown he's more than happy to do so.

I own one of these and use it to host my 800gbs of MP3s. Frankly, its a piece of shit. Getting ready to replace it with a different NAS enclosure.

Saying you can't share MP3s would require that the WD Anywhere software actually worked, which it doesn't most of the time (in fact they had a complete outage of the system for several weeks a few months back).

"Techdirt reports that Steve Jobs has been pitching studio execs on a scheme whereby DVD owners can pay extra for the "privilege" of ripping their DVDs -- but only for playback on iPods and iPhones. The thing is, Jobs fought the music industry back in the early iTunes day, arguing that people who buy CDs should have the right to rip them without paying anything extra."

And, for Jobs, DRM is a nice way to lock in consumers to his particular platform.

@1... from that article on the $371 savings,

"It would seem like ripping a movie yourself for free would be cheaper, but if you consider that it takes at least 90 minutes to convert a DVD… Even more if you factor in the legal fees of fighting a DMCA case for bypassing the copy protection."

Huh? 90 minutes to rip a DVD and convert it to a different format? Man seriously needs an new computer. And does he actually do nothing but sit there and stare at the screen while the DVD is being converted? Clearly someone talking about something he has zero experience with.

That's why they call them analysts!

And when was the last time anyone got a DMCA notice for ripping a DVD for their own use (as opposed to filesharing the rip)? I'd like to see one DMCA notice sent out in such a case.

Seriously, though, I notice that following the Amazon.Com link, the Pleo is *still* listed as pre-order.

What, is this thing going to ship with a copy of "Chinese Democracy" and "Duke Nukem Forever"???

Where's my Two Pleos, One Cup video?

"I think it's funny witnessing the sometimes heated reactions to these kinds of stories. It would be enough to say, "Hey, New Scientist isn't a peer reviewed journal," but no."

If the proper response to every science-related post is "that's not from a peer reviewed journal" there won't be much science discussion among non-scientists.

@32 wrote

I thought it was a given that the universe would eventually contract back to a tightly packed state as the stars wink out one by one and matter is reduced to it's component parts so that the massive force required will build up for the next Big Bang?

No, that is not a given at all. There are just too many unknowns still for any definitive answer on the ultimate fate of the universe.

For example, dark energy would repel matter and if there is enough of it would make it likely that the universe will simply expand forever. On the other hand, other scientists argue that dark matter, etc. could exert enough gravitational pull to eventually force the universe to collapse (though the notion that it has to collapse to another singularity is no given either).

@15... Two Astronomers, One Cup of Dark Matter?

The Telegraph article clearly misunderstands the Science article. The Telegraph article isn't even internally consistent. If you read it carefully, what they are really saying is that the fact that we can detect certain things may, in itself, say something about the state of the universe,

And Prof Krauss stresses that resetting the cosmic clock was not something we have done to the universe but rather what our cosmologically observations may imply about our knowledge of the cosmic clock: "I did not mean to imply causality - namely that our measurement itself reduces the lifetime of the universe - but rather that by being able to make our measurement we may thus conclude that we may not be in the late decay stage."

@19 wrote:

"I really love many aspects of Boing Boing but I must say that the sick fixation with 'goatse' and this new video (that I refuse to watch based on the oblique descriptions that I have read) really detracts from what is otherwise a great website."

Oh come on already. Boing! Boing!'s tagline is "A directory of wonderful things." What could be more wonderful than two women consuming feces? You must be a paid agent of the MPAA or something to post such criticism.

I'm just wondering when David Pescovitz is going to post a link to the much sought after "Two Bigfoot, One Cup" video. Then Cory can write a follow-up about the Sasquatch who originally filmed it sending out DMCA takedown notices to Youtube to bring it down.

"Wired's Threat Level does a good job of recapping Klein's abject failure to correct the record, and his editors' stonewalling on his partisan lies:"

Umm, if I were reading that and didn't know anything about Klein the word "partisan" would leave me with the impression that Klein is a conservative Republican when he is, in fact, a liberal Democrat.

Is Burger an option?

I'm with @4 ... as soon as I read about this I went and quit Facebook, letting them known in the little "why are you leaving" box that I'm sick of seeing story after story about how they're violating users' privacy.

@2 "Like most laws, this is the sort of program that is every bit as safe as the person implementing it. It gives more power to whoever's "in charge", and we all know what power does..."

No, the program itself is the problem if Fox News is accurate. The talking head specifically says that firefighters are being trained to profile and report people who are spouting "hate speech" and show "hostility toward Americans."

That doesn't just cross the line, it completely obliterates it.

Got a Kindle. Love it. Agree with Cory, however -- DRM and mobile carriers suck.

So:

Step 1 - Turn the wireless off (there's a convenient switch on the back just for this purpose) -- its an enormous battery drain anyway even when the device is not in use.

Step 2 - Use Mobipocket software to convert non-DRMed materials from Baen and elsewhere to non-DRMed Mobi files and copy to Kindle via USB.

Boom. Best of both worlds. eInk, annotation and search (lack of which is #1 reason I'd never buy Sony Reader), and no DRM.

BTW, one other thing...from reading the manual, the Kindle will allow you to wirelessly download non-DRMed Mobipocket/PRC files on any web page.

"In my very limited testing, it seems Kindle supports two types of text files natively**: .TXT files, or "plaintext" files, like those generated by Notepad, vi, and other common text editors; and .AZW, the proprietary format used by content download from Amazon."

This is the second story you've repeated this claim that a quick read of the support page or the manual would have clarified.

It also supports non-DRMed Mobipocket and PRC natively.

The way to go with this is a) buy it from Amazon, b) never buy content, period from Amazon. Obtain non-DRMed content, convert to non-DRMed Mobipocket, transfer via computer.

You can also convert from PDFs to Mobipocket (again, non-DRMed).

Okay, here's something I learned reading the Kindle manual which is genuinely annoying. Amazon is really pimping the ability to subscribe to newspapers/magazines for $10+/month depending on the newspaper. Except,

"Newspapers and magazines are also stored in Your Media Library but not permanently. Most publishers allow Amazon to store seven issues of their periodical for retrieval although this number varies by publisher."

So apparently if I want to keep that issue of the New York Times that has an article I want to reference over a few weeks, too bad ... all I can keep are the last 7 or so issues. Apparently they won't delete it from the Kindle device itself, but then I'm going to have to fill up my device just with old newspapers.

Also, with blogs, news and magazines, if you make any annotations, and then remove the blog, newspaper or magazine from your Kindle, they toss out the annotations even if the issue/entry is still save Your Media Library on Amazon's service.

Another reason simply to never by content from Amazon, but rather get the content elsewhere and convert to DRMfree formats and add to the device via USB.

Also, there isn't any file space for your own documents on Amazon's server. So say you decided to send your doc to Amazon so it converts the doc and then wirelessly adds it to your Kindle. Then you delete it from the Kindle. Then you a few weeks later you decide you want that doc again. You have to resend it and pay for it to be converted all over again.

The NAEB is just the buyers club for the Cybook. Main advantage that Kindle has over Cybook, aside from the wireless, is that Kindle appears to have much better features for annotation with the keyboard, etc.

I was waiting today to decide whether to by the Cybook or Kindle, and placed my order for the Kindle.

"I just realized something, if the EVDO doesn't explicitly shut off the Kindle is DOA. If you can't use it on a plane you just lost a large chunk of your market."

There is a physical Wireless switch that can be turned on or off specifically for situations where Wireless should not be in use.

"This piece of junk on the other hand is so control freakish that you can't even dump RTFs on it without paying/(or running it past) Amazon for the privilege."

Um, no. You can convert the RTF to Mobipocket and then transfer via USB with no charge and no DRM.

Is not being able to read PDF files really that stupid? All of the reviews I've seen of PDF on Sony and other ebook readers was considerably less than stellar due to the form factor issue (PDFs out there tend to be formatted for screen sizes much larger than typical ebook reader screens).

@Franko...the conversion process he tested out was the wireless one that doesn't require using a computer. So, no, you apparently can't e-mail a PDF to Amazon and then have it wirelessly appear on your device.

What you can apparently do is convert the PDF to Mobi and then transfer it from your computer to your Kindle.

It will be interesting to see if the Mobipocket dekstop client supports the Kindle, which would be very nice as they have really come a long way in that functionality to where it comes close to being iTunes for ebooks.

"The .DOC file I sent over the air to the Kindle arrived as a .AZW, the Kindle format, which implies to me that the only two file formats this thing can read natively are .AZW and .TXT. That's a huge bummer."

Umm, if you read the product pages, it natively supports .AZW, .TXT, .MOBI, and .PRC (and apparently only non-DRMed MOBI and PRC files).

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200137060

So the short version -- buy this, and convert unDRM-ed ebooks as in Baen to nonDRM-ed Mobi. I wouldn't buy any DRMed books from Amazon or anyone else, period.

DRM is Mobipocket, which Amazon.Com bought awhile ago.

Cybook still looks like the best option in this space since it will display so many different non-DRMed formats.

"Well, what if you exercise but use *willpower* to not eat more? I lost a lot of weight a year ago - 20 kg (44lbs) in 2 months - simply by increasing my daily exercise while maintaining my diet. The exercise did make me hungry, but it was possible to resist the temptation to eat more."

Exactly. I had a similar experience where I dramatically increased my exercise but maintained the same amount of calories...its just not a lot of fun.

You just know this is going to suck. Seriously, why not get everyone back together for a Goonies videogame, too, and then maybe Knight Rider: The Game?

But I thought the problem with airport security before 9/11 was that it was mostly private and that after airport security was nationalized it magically became effective.

Wow, writers want a cut of digital content...so, you mean, people actually *pay* for digital content? I thought you had to get all your digital content for free through Torrents and Usenet?

@nonesuch wrote:

"I'm just wondering if he was really tasered or is just claiming he was tasered. If he was really tasered, I don't see why nothing came of it. Surely some sort of punishment should be doled out for tasering unresponsive people."

Well, from TFA,

"An IPCC spokesman said: "The IPCC managed an investigation into an incident on July 13, 2005 in which West Yorkshire Police discharged a Taser at a man while he sat on a bus in Leeds.

"The man was mistakenly treated as a potential security threat when he was, in fact, in a hypoglycaemic state. The investigation report was submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service in November 2006.""

Then again, how does the idiot cop know he really fired a taser? Maybe he just handed him a greeting card. If it even happened.

"From the comments at the site, I think they're leery of discussing casting because some folks want to cast replicas of existing game pieces to either play with or sell. I don't think this "censorship" applies to original models like this amazing setup of buildings."

Which made no sense. That'd be like saying, well we'd like to tell you how we took the picture, but you could use your digicam to infringe other people's artwork.

@Matt Glaman: "Copyright is a need in a capitalist society. People would, and do, rip off others inventions calling it their own."

Not convinced that this is true.

@Kampauu "Boing Boing is promoting a totally ridiculous false dichotomy here. There is nothing fundamental to honoring copyrights that results in political repression."

True, but as Cory noted he's talking about the effects of a specific set of laws that the U.S. has been forcing on other countries that would never pass muster within the U.S. itself. *That* is a blueprint for repression.

"The main difference between all of the examples that Cory listed and HP is that HP is first and foremost a commercial enterprise whose primary purpose is to make the most money possible. Rowling isn't Joyce, Faulkner, Dylan or Wallace: she's the literary equivalent of Spongebob Squarepants. You think the copyright holders of other successful brands are going to sit idly by while someone else capitalizes on their brand image?"

Do you people ever visit bookstores? There are plenty of works like this and they are completely legal in principle. There are, for example, a dozen or so completely unauthorized guides to popular TV shows, such as Buffy/Angel shows that recycle a great deal of the details of the originals.

If I wanted to write an Unauthorized guide to Spongebob Squarepants, there's not a lot that Nickelodeon could due to stop me. This is exactly the sort of work that is protected by fair use.

"I'm a tech for the university. The university is considered an ISP. At least, that's what they tell me. It makes some sense, considering they provide internet service to thousands of people."

I work at a university as well, and I've never heard anyone express the view that we're a de facto ISP. In fact, many of the policies at quite a few universities would have to be very different if universities generally considered themselves ISPs.

And the number of people we provide Internet services to is i