unless the guys in that photo are rehearsing for an assault on the remedial math classes at Cal State, and the teacher's duties include defending the institution against such attacks, I really don't see the relevance.

As others have pointed out, the oath is meaningless in a civilized context. A terrorist, infiltrator, agitator or whomever would easily lie and sign the oath. Also, independent thinkers each contributing to society are a bonus; they are not the bad guys they seem to be to people who like loyalty oaths.

But humans are social creatures, and the primates in charge want signs of submission: cower and put your furry arms over your head, sign this loyalty oath... it's all the same thing to them. The purpose of the oath is to provide psychological comfort and reassurance to the authority figures making you sign it. In short, it's for the people who are still using the same exact brain circuits that were the default millions of years ago.

Takuan, I'm offended by the fact that I have not yet achieved sufficient force of personality to be compared to Dr. Lecter. Let me level a bit and we'll try again.

I'm also offended that you're smarting off here, but won't participate in this discussion by answering the questions. You believe I'm not entitled to those things? Then step up to the plate and say so, so we can give you the Scarlet F-for-Fascist. I'm looking at you too, Ill Lich, Rageahol, Patrick Dodds. Cowboy up and answer the questions.

(1) Am I or am I not entitled to clean, untainted air in my own home?

(2) Am I or am I not entitled to peace and quiet in my own home?

(3) Am I or am I not entitled to sleep on my own schedule in my own home?

I don't know that I really want to invoke Reverend Niemoller for rude, selfish, inconsiderate neighbors and street trash, but there are a lot of people posting here who are not considering the long-term implications of their statements. I have watched a quiet neighborhood where a loud conversation was an unusual, easily-ignored event become a 24-hour barrage of screaming children, car stereos, slamming doors and shouted conversations. This has happened in only 25 years.

How long until the disturbances escalate to something that bothers you? Here's another question with the same answer: How long until I say, "I tried to warn you", and laugh maniacally?

Noen, I'm not remotely trolling. On the subject of my privacy and personal space, believe me, I've made only the mildest of statements.

Crunchbird, Patrick Dodds: I am a misanthrope, the fact that you think it's okay to disturb me in my own home is why I'm a misanthrope, and you and many others keep dodging the important questions.

(1) Am I or am I not entitled to clean, untainted air in my own home?

(2) Am I or am I not entitled to peace and quiet in my own home?

(3) Am I or am I not entitled to sleep on my own schedule in my own home?

Seriously, when do I get to have a life of my own? Do I have to have the presence of other people forced on me 24/7 for the rest of time? I like human contact once in a rare while, but don't I get any choice in the matter?

"for some people ANY amount of BBQ smoke, music, or dog-doo is too much."

That's exactly right. You keep to yourself. You are not entitled to impose your presence on others.

"I've had neighbors complain as soon as we lit the grill, or because we were playing acoustic guitar on the porch at 8pm"

You can't control smoke from a grill. It goes into other people's houses and apartments. I have asthma, but even if I didn't, I wouldn't want to smell your fumes.

And you should never be playing guitar on your porch. You have no idea what other people's schedules are. I need to be up before the markets open. Am I supposed to sleep on your schedule? What if I was a worker on graveyard shift? You're just selfish and inconsiderate if you're making noise where other people have to put up with it.

"and even had downstairs apartment neighbors complain about us using the bathroom in the middle of the night, and try to get the landlord to evict us."

That's clearly inappropriate. You have to use a toilet; it's an unavoidable necessity of life.

"No-- I'm not fond of dog-poop, loud music, or excessive smoke, but in the city we all have to accept some of that."

Why? The law says I don't have to accept it. Apartment and condominium contracts say I don't have to accept it. Why are you saying that I do have to accept it?

"I live near a fire-house-- should I complain to the city every time there's a fire and I hear loud sirens going by my house?"

Like a toilet, fire fighting is a necessary thing.

You said "If I can hear your stereo, you are the bad guy." Oh please.

I'm not sure I understand your sophisticated argument here. Are you saying I am not entitled to peace and quiet in my own home?

And if I can smell your farts does that make you the bad guy? "Officer-- this guy keeps cutting the cheese-- arrest him!"

Aren't you the guy who just made the pro-toilet argument? Farting is another biological necessity.

I think you have not thought your way through the consequences of your actions on others. You don't have any right to any part of my life. You can't have one second of my time: not for your barbecue smoke, not for your guitar sounds, not for your dog's crap, and not for anything. What presumption of yours even remotely justifies the idea that you are allowed to impose yourself on me?

AssumeThePosition: "Uh... I believe it said 'drug dealers, vagrants and others who shouldn't be there'. Nothing about homeless."

Brainspore brought that up, in comment #2, but I could also make the case that "homeless" are a varietal of vagrants.

-------------
Rageahol: "so you're a clinical psychiatrist, then, and can make that sort of diagnosis?"

No and yes, in that order. I don't need professional training to know that someone who's talking to voices in his head or walking around yelling and aiming an imaginary machine gun at people has something wrong with his brain.

Rageahol: "#21: if you dont like it, move out to the suburbs, heartless yuppie scum."

You're telling Dizbuster to move to the suburbs to avoid being accosted and having shit on his doorstep? Are you seriously saying he's not entitled to be free of shit and panhandlers if he lives in the city?

-------------
Remarkable Hail:"There but for the grace of god go you."

No, there plus 40 ounces go we. Lots of people in this thread are saying "have compassion". I'm not going to have compassion for anyone who has no job and no home but still won't stop drinking! I've got issues like anyone, but if I was sleeping on the street because I was a drunk, my first priority would be to stop drinking! Why are so many people here acting like that is not the completely obvious first step?

-------------
Ill Lich: "... because you played your stereo too loud or didn't curb your dog or your backyard BBQ made too much smoke..."

Okay, are you really defending stereos that are too loud, dog shit, and barbecues that put out too much smoke? I'm having trouble believing what I'm reading. If I can hear your stereo, you are the bad guy. If your dog shits on my lawn, you are the bad guy. If your barbecue smoke comes onto my property, you are the bad guy. How can you possibly think you can do anything you want, even when it affects someone else's life?

Elysianartist, I know these con-men who masquerade as hard-luck cases; I'm forced to deal with them every day. Calling them "homeless", as if they've just fallen on hard times, is a lie.

Sure, one in a hundred, give or take, have genuine neurochemical issues. The remainder are more-or-less evenly divided between addicts who can't get into a shelter because they won't quit drugs, and responsibility-free bullshit artists who like easy money and gaming the system.

And, FYI, I vote Democrat across the board.

"Anybody else bothered by the idea of a mechanical centurion that turns a water hose on the homeless?"

No, and you misspelled "bums".

I'd like to know what is this loyalty oath ~*for*?

It's for these guys.

Does anyone here know when we might see new maps and new globes based on the MRO data? I google this now and then, and still find globes with data from Viking. :-)

I do not think people have an inalienable right to negotiate all the contracts they are offered (e.g. by software companies, websites, media distributors, etc).

Are you saying you think people don't have an inalienable right to say to someone offering a contract, "I don't like all the terms here. I'd like to amend this contract." May I write to Microsoft and ask them if I can have a license exception? May I write to Boing Boing and ask for some kind of special redistribution terms? It sounds like you're saying that people don't have an inalienable right to make a counter-offer, something which is pretty standard in business transactions.

I suspect you're trying to say that a company should have a right to turn down the counter-offer, but it's not clear from what you've written.

Tree, I would suspect you got disemvoweled because the thought that Boing Boing is shilling gadgets is ridiculous. Yes, BB has solidly entered its commercial phase as an out-and-out business, and will slowly undergo the calcification that comes to all life forms, but the idea that the BB gang has ever not loved the cool gadgets for pure geek value, that gadgets were not always part of what's going on here, is completely unjustified. There's a whole gadgets subdomain here.

If I'm paraphrasing correctly, the disemvowelling is for comments likely to incite *ahem* overly impassioned responses. I'm sure BB wants to maintain a certain tone to the forums to be suitable to a broad readership.

I think disemvowelling is counterproductive to a free discussion in the long run. (Of course, free discussion might or might not be part of the agenda; maybe the BB devs just want to post stuff they think is cool to a fun site.) Part of me thinks that the cure for bad speech is good speech, and part of me feels that the only way to determine what is bad speech and what is good speech is by open discussion.

Takuan, good point. :-)

So why don't publishers get that? Why are there still people pursuing arm's-length strategies? Why does it still seem like Gordon Gekko is running things?

Hell, why are people so unenlightenedly selfish? How can we maintain the high-complexity, high-technology society we have when the percentage of people who think short-term -- to their own detriment and that of others -- is growing so rapidly?

In short, why are people so remarkably stupid?

"Of course, a real publisher wouldn't give away paper books,"

There must be a Boing Boing reader or three with a sociology degree. Aren't there examples of societies built on sharing and cooperation? I specifically mean classical or well-established examples; the current hacker culture is young enough to be dismissed as a fad by the cynical.

When I'm killed, I immediately relax, and am often surprised at how many muscle groups I had unconsciously tensed.

Hell, in some intense team situations, waiting for a rez is your only downtime. Catch some ZZZs while you can. :-)

That table is exactly the right grid size to play go.

Why is it okay to discriminate against teens?

It's not discriminating against teens; it's discriminating against loiterers. People hanging out in front of your business drive away legitimate customers. People end up choosing between shopping in better neighborhoods or dealing with the stress of wondering if they're going to be asked for money, or maybe have to listen to a bunch of foul-mouthed jerks saying n-word this and "motherfucker" that.

Sometimes the people hanging out are listening to music, doing tricks on their skateboards, or smoking. When I go shopping, I want a quiet, relaxing experience, not something noisy and stressful.

It's entertaining to write with a point of view, but this is a little much.

You're right. Stealing involves, literally, stealth. This is robbery.

If you can get past an irrational hatred for all things TSA, you might agree that this is a reasonable solution.

The only irrational part of this is the TSA being allowed to pretend that what they're doing is remotely sensible. The TSA, the DHS, the Bush Administration and the scared, stupid people who ceded their civil rights to those agencies have done far more damage to the US than any terrorist could ever do.

The terrorists destroyed two buildings and killed 2800 people. (And not all of those were actually people; many of them were stockbrokers and lawyers.)

Corrupt government officials and scared, stupid US citizens destroyed our civil rights, including parents' ability to feed their children properly.

Score against US sanity: Terrorists 2802, Government 1,654,487.

This is SO not just an internet phenomenon. It's like rich people being eccentric. We can just afford to do it on the internet.

... what country wants a cute, upbeat national anthem?

I think a lot of countries want a John Williams theme, so other countries will respect and fear them.

Personally, I'd love something more upbeat, and given recent US foreign policy, I think the national anthem should be "I Can't Decide" by Scissor Sisters.

Hmmm.

But their revenue comes from advertisers; and it is advertisers they must keep happy. Keeping us happy is merely a necessary prerequisite, not the goal.

Hmmm. I'd pay money if I could get people to stop using the concept of intent. It's a religious concept because it's impossible to genuinely know what someone else is thinking. Intent is also used to excuse atrocious behaviour; that's just as bad as taking orders from Invisible Sky Man. In each case, accountability for the outcome is displaced to an imaginary being.

I don't know and I don't care what Google's goals are. In practice, end users trump advertisers at Google. Google is servicing end users. The proof is this: if the advertisers had their way, they'd be using the same stupid tactics at Google that they use at other sites because it's only been three million years since they touched the damn monolith. Google is forcing an intelligent -- i.e., long-term -- choice on the advertisers by (a) being the market leader, and (2) not letting them be stupid. But that choice is putting the end users first. The result is a better situation for both the end users and the advertisers.

I could talk extensively about the "breaking of the circle", but you'll have to wait for my book. In short, society has a lot of problems because people are stupid. The primary stupidity is that they don't take care of each other. The upper class directs the flow of money-power-energy-information to go in one direction: up. The lower class directs the flow of money-power-energy-information to go in one direction: down. That doesn't work. You end up with Marxism and unions on one side, and soulless reactionary suits on the other, in a positive-feedback loop that continues to drive the groups even further apart.

The base of the pyramid is the base of all economic production. The brainpower at the top is needed to co-ordinate and optimize that production. You need both in balance to work; it's like a boat with two propellers: if one propeller is spinning faster than the other, the boat goes in a circle. (Take two Matrix: Reloaded and call me in the morning.) Google has simply begun to restore the practice of those at the top of the pyramid taking care of those at the bottom, and those at the bottom caring for the top.

Newspapers make money by selling ads, not papers.

This is the heart of the old business model. Businesses that are following the old model are all in trouble. The big three television networks, radio and newspapers all work on the model that the advertiser is the customer. The viewer, the listener and the reader -- i.e., us! -- are the product to be delivered. The actual medium is, in each case, just the truck used to deliver us to the cattle chutes.

That's why we love Google the way we do. They are using the new business model. We, the end users, are Google's customers. The advertisers are there to support us; thus, they don't get privileged placement, either in rankings or in obnoxious banners. We moved to Google because we trusted them more; I vividly remember thinking, "None of these results are ads?" and dropping the other search engines quite literally immediately. Google's logic is that by catering to the end user, they can expand the whole market qualitatively, serving everyone better. That logic, the "rising tide" model, seems to be working this time.

This is all possible because the internet is as close to a true democracy as this planet's ever come. I know an actual bum who has a blog. You can literally be homeless and jobless and still participate. Earlier democracies have had de facto barriers to entry that were much higher. To vote, you have to leave your house; to start a blog, you just need to sit down in front of your computer. To change your newspaper subscription requires a request, personal information, a delay and paying attention to bills. Reading a different website requires a new tab loading in the background while you finish reading at your current news site; and you're not committed to that news site in any way.

The new model is finally a much more real democracy, based on a technical layer designed to re-route around a nuclear war. The old model requires scarcity to justify an oligarchy; that scarcity no longer exists in the degree it once did, and if you read Boing Boing regularly, you'll read about frequent attempts to impose a new artificial scarcity. Those are just stopgaps, of course; you can't use the old business model anymore.

Well, you can, but that guy with the weird round, spinning, sled runners is going to out-pull your old-style sled any day.

Well, in that case, Joel, check out Headph0ne Phet1sh.

You're welcome. :-)

> How do you measure the purity of drivel?

On a scale of -1 to +14, with -3 representing Neal Stephenson and +17 representing the combined drivel of the Bush administration.

> I do find it ironic that we can excuse someone not paying for part of their meal(given that the service was up to par)

No one is entitled to a tip. It's not stealing to not leave a tip. A tip is a bonus, a gift, a present. You remind me of morons where I work complaining that they didn't get an annual bonus. You don't get to complain that you didn't get a tip, by definition.

Also, a tip for quality of service is based on unbelievably subjective criteria. Even if you believe that, in theory, someone is entitled to a tip, the concept is completely unmeasurable.

> and accuse someone who's actually losing money

Not getting a tip is not losing money. It may be not getting any money, but it's not losing money.

Wrenling, assuming you're not just trolling... which SWG did you play? Early SWG was lots of fun. It was the corporate, post-Raph game that was lame. Sony has zero concept what an MMO really is, and was trying to turn SWG into another World of Warcrap. The UI changes and the Combat Upgrade, which I witnessed, were part of that. I left before the NGE, but from what I've read, it's more of the same.

Cory, any word on when we can actually sign up?

Speaking as my company's "computer guy", I wish all cable runs let you follow which cable goes where.

Maybe he said, "Paolo lies."

Sorry, Father Brown, she ownz j00. Hahahahahahahaha!

> Xeni, how do you walk around in fur in L.A.? ...
> it doesn't ever get quite cold enough

Oh, you have no idea, my friend, no idea! I live in Las Vegas, Nevada, and there isn't a day that goes by without a zillion complaints about the freezing temperatures in the US Southwest. Of course, in Vegas, freezing means a low in the mid-40s Fahrenheit.

Accordingly, there isn't a day that goes by that I don't wish to kidnap all the complainers and send them to Wisconsin for a couple of weeks, just for comparison purposes........ ;-)

Wait a minute. That's the exact same music we were listening when I was in high school, before these kids were born! Don't they have their own music?

John Markos O'Neill FTW!!! B-)

Shrdlu, didn't you mean to ask Irregular if "anal-retentive" is hyphenated or not? :-)

In related news, an alien flying saucer invasion of Nagoya was thwarted by a mysterious stranger, after which the mini police station made a sound like a thousand elephants trumpeting and faded away.

> Yet I don't seem to remember jeremiads against
> $4,000 computers.... why do you ever see a movie
> or do anything that is not absolutely necessary
> when people are starving somewhere in the world?

Computers DO something. Movies TELL STORIES. Unless you're a member of the Green Lantern Corps, jewelry is absolutely worthless except as a means of social control and intimidation. It has NO intrinsic value. Its only function is manipulating psychology.

Let's get rational for a second here; the ISP is corrupting your data.

I'm emotionally erect.

Joel, thank you for speaking out strongly about this sort of behaviour.

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. In a world where a child dies every five seconds because we don't ship enough food everywhere, spending money on status symbols cannot be criticized too thoroughly.

Thank you for standing up and speaking straight.

Ummm, this isn't "vaguely" NSFW. It's completely, totally, naked-dryadically NSFW :-)

Isn't this an appeal to kids, like most marketing? Aren't the kids 'heroes' these days Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan?

Play Chat Noir and become two stones stronger! :-)

I think rating a lack of information as bad is the right thing to do. Secrecy is part of the problem in human society.

Electronic manufacturing and other large, complex or high-tech businesses don't exist in a vacuum; they are part of a complex society, an inter-dependent technological system that took literally millennia of back-breaking to build. Large manufacturers are built on, and dependent on, the labor of workers; the highest technology manufacturers are exponentially more dependent on this economic food chain made of literally billions of individual workers.

Manufacturers must be held accountable by and to the people of all the world for what they do. They must report clearly and unambiguously to the people whose labor makes possible the manufacturers' very existence.

There is no way to hold large companies accountable -- or for that matter, reward them for good behavior -- without thorough transparency. A lack of information is not just a sign that a company might be worthy of a second, more thorough, examination. A lack of openness is a profound breach of the social contract.

Kyle asked, "But anyway, it's a soup made of meat and fish and vegetables. Where are the carbs?"

Fruits and vegetables are carbs. They're not as loaded as refined white sugar from a box -- which should be labeled with a skull and crossbones -- but they do provide fiber and sugars, and they do so in varying amounts depending on the particular vegetable.

# # #

As for Atkins, he says in his 1972 book that he started as a cardiologist. He kept giving his patients the high-carb, low-fat diet that the nutritionists recommended for people with heart disease, and his patients kept dying anyway.

Atkins started doing his own research on nutrition. He found military studies on survival situations that studied extreme diets like carbs-only, fat-only, protein-only, et cetera. He found that patients on a no-carb diet switched over into a different metabolic state in about 48 hours. I commented on this altered metabolic state a few weeks ago, but the short version is that your body starts converting your stored fat into carbohydrates as needed. This is what makes people on Atkins lose so much fat so quickly; they're no longer storing fat, they're burning it. (I'm over-simplifying here, of course, but these are the broad strokes of the Atkins diet.)

The idea that you can get rid of stored fat on your body by removing fat from what you put in your mouth is a well-intentioned but profound mistake, a form of sympathetic magic. Your body is an enormous chemical factory. If you stop eating fat and protein and eat only carbohydrates, but in excess of your caloric needs, you'll store the excess as fat. Your body turns the carbs into fat. Atkins is just the reverse of this, turning stored fat back into carbs. (I'm sure the evolutionary reason for this is that fat stores the caloric energy more densely, at nine food calories per gram. Carbs hold only four food calories per gram.)

The best that can be said about our understanding of nutrition is that it is at a very primitive state, requiring much more study. At the very least, there need to be many more studies at a very basic level to re-assess the unquestioned nutritional assumptions of the past, and there need to be many more studies of nutrition in subjects on diets more reflective of our evolutionary heritage.

(I live in the US, and I have no doubt that these studies have been and will continue to be held back by at least two groups. One is the enormous US sugar lobby, which provides the US with huge amounts of the least expensive sugar in the world. The second group is the religious fundamentalists; they continue to promote the idea that the human species is only 6000 years old and was made from dirt by an invisible man in the sky who is short on cash; these people hold an unbelievable amount of political power here.)

Could we do something other than disemvowelling for obnoxiousness? I can't make heads nor tails of it, which means I don't entirely get the particular stupidity that's being punished to begin with. Couldn't the disemvowelling be changed to, for instance, having a pink background or something equally obnoxious but more legible?

Let's say we know with absolute metaphysical certainty that the prisoners at Guantanamo are irredeemably evil, absolute, gold-plated bastards.

We're still supposed to treat those prisoners well, not because the prisoners are the good guys, but because WE are. Idealism carries a cost, but we're supposed to pay that cost, make those sacrifices, because we are the good guys. We believe in higher ideals, and listen to the "better angels of our nature". We do the right thing, even when it hurts.

Don't we?

Well, so much for reading the Harry Potter books. I've heard they were good, and was waiting for a nice trade paperback set to come out, maybe in a box of some sort.

I won't give Rowling money if this is her attitude.

Apparently conservative political sites have been directing their readers to vote for it, whether they read it or not.

Institutions 187634285734, Individuals 0. Evil is apparently a competitive advantage.

thats no garage, thats a warehouse

I have a very bad feeling about this.

You could even animate it so that the eyeball travels from one side to the other...

Well, if you're going to do that, it should be one of those gadgets that follows the mouse. ;-)

... but fail to see how this is a problem unique to libertarianism since ultimately every system ends up putting these same short-sighted decision makers into some system of authority and organization.

I agree, short-term thinking is not unique to libertarianism. I've been really obsessed of late with people's failure to be 'good at being selfish'; most people don't even make decisions that will benefit them a week from now, let alone years in the future.

Why would Comcast screw their customers over? Because it makes them a little more money today? Do all the Comcast decision makers plan on working for other firms five and ten years from now? Does management think customers are infinitely replaceable?

Why did people support the PATRIOT act in 2001, when the most superficial examination of history shows that giving government lots of power comes back to bite you later?

Why do people smoke cigarettes? Hell, cigarettes have consequences five minutes from now, when non-smokers don't want to stand near you!

Why do people drive 20 miles per hour too fast to be safe, to save five minutes travel time? Aren't they weighting the remaining 70 years of their life sufficiently?

I'm still trying to think my way through human psychology, and figuring out what I mean to say, so please pardon me if I'm unclear. The reason I think of libertarianism specifically when thinking of profit, both long-term and short-term, is that the libertarian assumptions seem to require the maximization of long-term profit (or satisfaction, or utils, et cetera) to justify a broadly free market, where other market strategies may or may not need a long-term view. I've moved to the left a lot in the last ten years, because the people running businesses often seem completely oblivious to long-term issues, and the right-wing view depends on people seeing their own long-term benefit.

Comcast, like any other profit-maximizing firm...

That might be better phrased as "any other short-term profit-maximizing firm...". The weakness in the libertarian position as a practical organizational principle is that few decision-makers maximize long-term profit, instead opting for cash flow, short-term profit or short-term satisfaction. Theoretically, libertarian economics might still work, if the Adam Smith assumptions are applied; they have never been applied on a large-scale. It's impossible to say what the results of an entire planet collectively choosing to maximize long-term profit would be, because the experiment has never been done.

The reason farmers are more important is that they make stuff. I have said for many years, only half-jokingly, that the only real businesses are farming and construction; the rest of us are middlemen. Without real production, all those bankers, stockbrokers, lawyers and people in Statistical Analysis and Data Reconfiguration have nothing to do. (Well, except learn to hunt and gather.)

I had forgotten about Lights Out, but there were high winds here in the valley and my power went out for almost two hours!!!

Kenneth said: Move to the land where there are no kids. Or move someplace where you can fence in all your property and be sure no one will come near you.

I'm in the process of making this happen now. I'm taking the expense of the failure of parents to discipline their kids and the failure of the law to discipline the parents. I only wish I could successfully sue to recover the time and money I'm going to have to lay out to work and read and study and sleep on my own schedule.

You've taken the position that I am not entitled to peace and quiet in my own home. You've taken the position that trespassing is acceptable. You've taken the position that expecting the courts to enforce the laws supporting my peace and quiet and my right to say who walks on the land I'm going to have to buy is frivolous. Are you kidding? Those aren't seriously positions you're trying to support, are you?

I'll join the human race when there is one; until now, all I've seen is a bunch of uncivilized savages whose attitude is, "I can do whatever I want and there's nothing you can do to stop me."

JPhilby, going outside to tell kids to play elsewhere is just as distracting and frustrating as having them there. Worse, the kids will frequently go away for five minutes and then start right up again.

If I could automate getting rid of these little monsters, never turned into people by their parents, I would. But if you think automation isn't a good method, then what do you recommend? Police? A lawsuit? Those take forever to work. What do you recommend to get rid of the kids now and keep them gone?

@Kenneth: "So what?" Try working, reading, studying or programming with a bunch of undisciplined brat kids running around yelling and screaming on your property, or anywhere in your neighborhood. It's rude and it's wrong, and I'd like to see parents who allow their kids to behave like that put in jail for making another generation of selfish, inconsiderate jerks.

Cory, I'm kind of torn. I want as many people as possible to be aware of Micro$oft scheming, but that headline drew me in mostly on the basis of being wrong^H^H^H^H^Hsensationalistic. How can you sue Linux? Linux is a smart product, but not sentient! (Even if it were, there would have to be 50 years of civil rights protests to get a US court to strike down the "CARBONS ONLY" and "SILICONS ONLY" drinking fountains.)

To be fair, it the headline had read "First-ever patent-suit filed against Novell and Red Hat Linux", I would certainly have said, "Not slackware, fsck 'em." :-)

NSFW? I don't mean to be a prude, but can we tag/hide/link this type of content?

Or better yet, can we fix work somehow?

DragonPhyre>I always thought that ages ago when our diet was more protein (meat, bugs, etc.) that it was extra large intestine that simply we did not need anymore with our move to carbohydrates as our main staple of food.

I've been on the Atkins diet, which reduces carbohydrate consumption to less than 20 grams per day. I take Atkins somewhat seriously, because the 1972 book was completely accurate about how much weight I would lose, how fast I would lose it, my increased energy level, et cetera.

I believe very low carb diets are still somewhat controversial, but I'm still not convinced that they've been thoroughly tested. Dr. Atkins' claim was that eating very low amounts of carbohydrates changed your metabolism to a kind of different 'setting', where you burn and store consumed calories differently than you do when eating large amounts of carbohydrates. It's been suggested that this is a state similar to the conditions under which we evolved, but completely different from our current environment.

The problem is that the vast majority of medical studies are and have been conducted on people eating the standard high-carb diet. If our bodies are really evolved to handle a completely different diet, then we should find out as much as we can about how we really react to that diet. Someone should fund an institute that would recruit and train people to be on low-carb diets over very long periods of time, maybe over generations, so we can gather data on this alternative, and perhaps natural, metabolic state.

Dave X> Vajayjay? Don't you mean "hoo-ha?"

My dad used to call it the Bermuda Triangle, because more men had been lost there than anywhere else.

OMG! Just REMOVE IT!!!

*sigh*

The Unusual Suspect> Om, Geno Z. [sic] Heinlein, regarding bikini remarks, speaking of fail: http://xkcd.com/322

Okay, I just got home from work, so I'm bored and cranky, and definitely not in the mood to be scolded for nothing.... I'll feed the troll.

Xeni's hot. Xeni's smart. If she didn't already have an SO, I'd propose. She's the kind of woman I dream of. There would be something wrong with me if I didn't want bikini pics!

So, seriously, what's the deal? What could possibly be wrong with finding Xeni attractive? Or with saying so? Please bear in mind, I'll be somewhat harsh with any reply that implies that Xeni can't take a compliment, or ignore a little flirting if she just doesn't care for it.

PS: And just for the record, if you read very precisely, I didn't actually request bikini pics. I did think it was funny to juxtapose the two comments.

P2S: The preceding postscript should in no way be construed as a lack of interest in bikini pics of Xeni, which would be simultaneously hot and cool.

Shalabi> Kinda [gutsy] saying that whole "had me at the first seven words" thing considering there are two black individuals on the poster.

They're not individuals, they're conservatives, it's completely the opposite. :-)

Q: stinkingpig> How are 1-5 minute video clips going to make that better?

A: om> ...Xeni, we're expecting at least one episode with you in a really hot bikini! :) :)

> Just a little observational feedback... are you guys not allowed to cross-post?

Please, no more cross-posting! Boing Boing is already the single biggest contributor to my daily RSS feeds. BB is more than 50% of my feed, even though I have over 30 subscriptions. Every time I login to Google Reader, I consider dropping Boing Boing, despite the fact that, as JHudson said, it's all good stuff.

Please, once and once only!

> my question is why do we care what a talk show
> host thinks about the shape of the world?

Because this ignoramus now has a platform, and because we need to ask ourselves why we live in a society where profoundly uneducated people have an open channel to 300 million viewers.

To me the really sad thing when someone kills themselves is that we've lost someone who's sensitive enough to be driven to suicide, but the heartless, soulless bastards of the world just go on and on.

Did anyone else notice the Aliens theme going on today? :-)

> there are pop ups on this site like WHOA.

You might consider adding Adblock and noscript also. I got no popups visiting the link.