Well, BB'ers, I don't know this Violet Blue character from a hole in the ground, and I figure you might have a good reason for the big nuke, but here's the thing: you have every right to be secretive about your withdrawal of support...

...but you wouldn't quietly accept such behaviour from others if the situation was reversed. I don't truck with hypocrisy. So you've just lost two eyeballs.

"Not everyone has experience with parliamentary process"

And those people shouldn't make assertions about it from a soapbox.

Anyhow. By all accounts, this bill is opposed by the Liberals and the NDP. If'n we want this bill to fail, it's the Bloc that we need to convince.

"I can't wait for Charlie Angus to play this back in Parliament during the next Question Period: Ministers who lie on national radio about their legislation don't fare well in Parliamentary democracies."

Except that questioners cannot present multimedia materials during Question Period, and they can (and often will) be ejected from the chamber for accusing another member of being a liar.

Ministers who lie on national radio, or TV, or in the papers, or anywhere else, actually do fare pretty well in Parliamentary democracies. And other democracies.

Seriously, Cory, evangelism is great and I oppose the legislation with every fibre of my being, but at least know what you're talking about before you throw around stuff like this. It doesn't serve the message.

"BNL did this better."

No, not even close. This was brilliant. An order of magnitude better than the BNL video.

The cabinet came in several colours. At an antiques store near where I lived ten years ago they had one in glittery turquoise. No screen, but with all other original electronics, for $150. It didn't occur to me what it was until it had already been sold.

It's less cool when you read the story and learn that there's no human cells involved. They're mouse stem cells.

Wikipedia reveals the chip to be in the lower-right corner as viewed from the front:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Oyster_card_partially_destroyed.jpg

Of course, you don't need to know this to disable it by hammer. You only need to smash the card a bunch of times.

Maybe, Cory, but it doesn't seek to poison "open gaming systems", plural. Both the title and the quote make it seem as if WotC's trying to prevent people from publishing work based on licenses that WotC doesn't own, which isn't the case.

This post is inflammatory and misleading, and frankly, I expect better of both you and this site.

Pretty woefully misinformed. The OGL was written and published by WotC!

This is like any licensor offering a license under the condition that you not produce works under the old version. Publish 4.0-compatible books, not 3.0-compatible books.

And, of course, this doesn't stop any canny publisher from creating a separate, parallel company and thereby producing both kinds of work.

If those were the funniest bits from The State, I'm glad that I never bothered to sit through more than half an episode.

It'd be interesting if Manson was able to come here and give some feedback on this. However, he undoubtedly doesn't have any Net access.

Which means, of course, that Charlie don't surf.

I'm both apalled by the childishness and petty vandal mindset that would drive someone to do this, and impressed by what is a clever brainhack.

Use your powers for good, kids. Trust me, there's a better chance of you getting laid and a lower chance of you getting asskicked.

I'd check the shower head for bees first.

"Physicists at the Brookhaven LHC before it was turned on calculated a maximum chance of 20 in a billion that it would destroy the Earth."

The odds are better than 20 in a billion that if you step into the shower, you will slip, crack your head and die. Or get hit by a car. Or killed by lightning. Or eaten by a wild animal. Or have a sudden allergic reaction and choke to death. And on and on and on.

20 in a billion is statistically irrelevant.

Why did she e-mail you? Just because she could, or did you piss her off somehow? I ask because people are getting freakier.

I'd never exchanged a single word with her, ever, as far as I know. The e-mail wasn't addressed specifically to me; my suspicion is that it was a massmail. If you want a copy, feel free to send me a note.

"I'm tenacious, some will even say stubborn"

The Supreme Court said that no appeals would be heard. There's a difference between tenacious and thicker than two short boards. Whatever you wrote (I didn't read it), you're wrong.

So on another subject: I added my e-mail address to my profile in the interests of transparency, and it didn't take long to get e-mail from Diane Lask, a disgruntled commenter who got disemvowelled and banned for some rude accusation about paid editorializing.

Even the most cursory glance at the site proves that the Boingers are looking to make a little money here. Self-links, promotions, advertisements, and so forth. That's clear.

But guess what? If they want to devote a whole week to the products of one of their sponsors, they can knock themselves out. They can roll around in a swimming pool full of money. They can have a big Microsoft Mobile Parade down the middle of Redmond, Washington, throwing copies of their books into the crowd. They don't even have to be open or transparent about it. They can obfuscate. They can lie.

Y'know why?

Because it's their site and they don't owe me a goddamn thing.

So, Diane Lask. Feel free to start your own blog, find some sponsors, and write hourly essays about how the Boingers have sold out and how we all 'deserve' to know about their business dealings. You have fun with that. And keep your spam out of my fckng mlbx.

Anyhow. I just wanted to say: good job, Ms. Nielsen Hayden, for rooting out and crushing one. Don't get any on you.

This is an extraordinarily complicated case. DC still has half the copyright, there will still be appeals by DC/Warner, and any suit over licenses and payments could take aother decade.

Yeah, I screwed up the quotations in there. Paragraphs 2 and 4 are from #363's original.

Oh, yeah, and on disemvowelling: it feeds the trolls. Feeding the trolls is unwise. Thus, using that method is unwise.

#363:

When I write that it may not result in truly unbiased moderation, that implies that it may still result in truly unbiased moderation. I imply two likely outcomes: truly unbiased moderation or the illusion of unbiased moderation. Either is equally acceptable, because the audience can't tell the difference.

That seemed a, tacit, at the very least, belief that the appearance of non-bias was at least as good as the real thing; if not better.

There's no implication that I see one as better, and any inference is unwarranted by the text.

This is certainly supported by the clarification you make of exactly that position.

There's no such support in my clarification. You know what "sufficient", means, right?

You're splitting hairs and being argumentative for the sake of it, I think, with what amounts to a red herring. The original issue was simple: does the moderator exert undue influence on threads in which she becomes involved? Yes, she does. And I adequately explained why.

In simple words: Bias bad. Fairness good. Illusion of fairness often just as useful. When moderator not in discussion it good. When moderator in discussion, it bad. Trolls shut up good, trolls complain bad.

Objection sustained, case adjourned, and the Supreme Court refuses to hear the appeal.

"Saying an illusion, instead of some real manifestation, of fairness is to be preffered is a strange tack to take."

Objection. Assumption of facts not in evidence. At no point did I suggest or imply that the illusion was preferred.

In any case, the illusion of propriety even where none exists forestalls endless complaining. I'm more interested in seeing the trolls shut up than seeing fairer moderation. As such, an illusion of fairness is sufficient.

"Jim Cowling (12): Did it ever occur to you, when you were defending the poor oppressed questions against their answer overlords, that the same person wrote both?"

You've written it in the form of an FAQ; my tongue-in-cheek summary was likewise written in the form of an FAQ. Or maybe you've never before been asked questions like those in your policy, in which case the reason it was styled as an FAQ is a mystery.

I promise that I wrote both the answers and the questions in my response. Y'know, just in case you weren't sure.

"If it's true that participating in the conversation when you're the moderator gives you undue influence, all I can say is that the effect definitely hasn't kicked in yet. I'm looking foward to it."

Well, you are the only person who alters or deletes comments in threads in which you're involved. Some would call that undue influence.

IMHO, moderation works best when it is dispassionate and unbiased. It is a rare person who can moderate that way when involved in a conversation. And when I mean 'rare', I mean that theoretically such people exist, but I've never met one. I'm sure as hell not one of them, and I've been moderating on and off since the pre-Web era.

Better that multiple moderators work as a team, and recuse themselves from discussions in which they become involved. It may not result in truly unbiased moderation, but it gives the illusion of unbiased moderation.

Anyhow, I'm just talking. In the final analysis, we can like it or lump it, and I'm more than happy to like it. I've been disemvowelled once, but I don't post often and I don't go out of my way to be an ass.

I figure that you're just an irritable and unpredictable force of nature. Posting to BoingBoing is like living in Tornado Alley. And we like the cheap real estate too much, so we take the risk of the storm coming in.

"If you want to look at a large community that seems to foster somewhat intelligent respectful discussions, I'd suggest going over to Metafilter and taking a look at how they handle things."

And then doing the opposite. Respectful? Please.

Summary:

Q: Reasonable question?

A Snide answer.

Q: Other reasonable question?

A: Unpleasant, jaded answer.

Q: Kinda snotty question?

A: Withering, unhelpful answer.

Is this an April Fool's joke? David Brin is described doing this:

“It is impossible for you to succeed without us!” he shouted at the assembled officials, while banging his fist on the table and at one point jumping off his chair to wave a mobile phone in their faces.

I dunno. Niven being racist, that I can see. He's got a history of it, but maybe that's part of the gag, too.

Enh. Pre-op, post-op, therapy or not, doesn't matter to me. If someone identifies as male, I call him "he". If someone identifies as female, I call her "she".

I still find the 'pregnant man' thing kinda creepy.

Ray sting peace.

#18: I worked full-time managing a comic shop for seven years while also working on my degree part-time, and never once lowballed someone. You don't need to be a prick to make a very respectable living in collectibles; I know this from personal experience. I'm not even remotely jealous of anyone who has to live inside a mind that would consider such shady dealing to be acceptable.

I would sooner see someone with the resources pay a fair price for a valuable collection than to steal it myself for pennies, because I'm not an unethical pig.

"You're complaining at him selling an issue at two or three times the market value? Why should he NOT do so?"

By selling items with no real collectible value for significantly more than market value, he gives the illusion of increased value, and like he's done for decades, takes advantage of the uninformed.

Maybe you live in a world where the foolish and stupid should be exploited rather than educated. I'm glad that isn't my world.

Here's my take:

If person A offers person B an item at Price X, and person B knows he's getting a deal, person B has no moral obligation to pay more.

If, however, person B is making the offer, there's a moral obligation to make a fair offer, not merely an acceptable offer. Even an offer of ten cents on the dollar would have been acceptable at the time, IMHO, but what is fair depends on what's being sold. Those same books if found today? IMHO, a fair offer would be a mere agency fee. A fair offer for your Beanie Babies might be a view of the door. Y'know?

And to answer your EBay question: no. That's a competitive market; listed items will tend to sell for their real market value because of that competition, the sizes of the markets, and the availability of information on values (both real value and retail values). At one time, one could make a decent profit by buying collectibles via one online venue and reselling it on another. Not nearly as reliable anymore. If people didn't want to compete for the item, then maybe the minimum bid is the fair price.

Ivymike, yup, it sure is. And it's not the only time that he's bought a lage and important collection for a fraction of a percent of its actual value. Rozanski is scum, plain and simple, the worst kind of opportunistic collectibles dealer. With all of his grand claims of doing good for the 'community', and his assertions that the heirs to the estate were in a hurry, he's a rip-off artist.

He claims that the heirs demanded a cash payment and wouldn't have been willing to take payment over time, but that's bull. If he'd been upfront about the collection's value, he still could have gotten a more than fair margin. He paid $1,800 for a collection of 20,000 comics that was then worth more than $300K and would now be worth almost $50M. He made more than $2M selling just a portion of those books by 1985. That's unthinkably callous.

Just one of the books in the collection -- just one -- recently sold for more than $250,000. The copies of Action #1 through #10 in the collection sold for $30K in the early 80s. That #1 alone is now worth something like $2M.

The Church family did sue him, and lost. That doesn't mean that he was morally in the right.

He overcharges for recent, low-value issues (missed a copy of a book last year? It'll cost you double retail), too. He's scum of the lowest order, and has harmed the industry in unspeakable ways.

Free Tibet...with any purchase over $20.

I'm all for taking principled stands, but I'm not all that supportive of principled stands that have no meaning. The state constitution isn't going to be changed while the SCOTUS is controlled by the current goon squad (which may be for decades).

Far, far easier to just cross her fingers or to ask her god for forgiveness for a moment of weakness. Sign the damn piece of paper and forget about it. She isn't going to get fired for refusing to shoot commies and hippies on sight if the time comes. It's a meaningless oath, and by amending it and refusing to sign the original, she is ascribing meaning to the document that it didn't have.

Oh, please. His fourth amendment rights? You leave a store with merchandise -- and almost uncertainly this was a store with a big, bold sign visible as you enter that tells you that you may be required to show a receipt -- and refuse to show proof that you've paid for it, whether you have or not. That's probable cause by any reasonable standard.

Remember that probable cause does not require a better-than-even chance of a crime having been committed, merely a 'fair probability' as per Illinois vs Gates (1983). And hearsay can even supply probably cause.

Look, I'm as much a supporter of civil liberties as the next Canuck, and I agree that it's annoying showing your receipt. I don't like doing it, either. But the idea that you can do so without fear of a run-in with the law is frankly ridiculous.

#39: "the boingers can write about anything they find interesting, and invite the participation of any writers they please."

No argument here: again, 'that's fine, because it's not our site.' But Tesanovic's articles stick out like, say, a recipe for cookies would on a gaming blog.

"A decent, witty website should not feature Tesanovic's rants."

She's Bruce Sterling's wife, and Sterling is one of BB's patron saints. That's the only reason I can think of why her posts are here and are so prominent (much more of her posts are 'above the jump' than most other posts.) What she writes does not otherwise fit in with the subject matter on BB, except in the most nebulous sense of 'we don't like repression'.

The argument might be made that if someone wanted to write about the continuing repression in Burma, they'd link to it, but I'm not sure that I would agree. Nor do I think that BB is the best place for it. We don't often (or ever) see articles about the shooting of East Timor's veep, or bombings in Kashmir or Colombia or the Basque region. Just one very slanted look at the Balkans, because that's what one friend of the family likes to write about.

And that's fine, because it's not our site. But it's also telling, because it illustrates an unpleasant bias. And it's also disappointing, because I don't think it's what most readers come here for.

Jocoska, I'm more than a little confused. Why is it all right for Macedonia to peacefully separate from Yugoslavia but not for Kosovo to peacefully separate from Serbia?

"It's definitely a good time to be vegetarian"

I was under the impression that something like 90% of e.coli cases came from underwashed vegetables and fruits and unpasteurized juices.

Used chip shop oil, maybe.

Congratulations, you three!

'Poesy' always has three syllables, so it's not quite a haiku. But I think she's got a surplus of potential nicknames. :-)

Huh. I thought that maybe I was being alarmist. Apparently, having codeine in your bloodstream is enough to get you sentenced to four years in jail. I can buy codeine off the shelf without a prescription. I have generic acetominaphine-codeine tablets in my bathroom, purchased at Shoppers Drug Mart. I took one yesterday for a headache.

I don't want to be on a plane that's going to be travelling anywhere near Dubai.

So you want to go to Dubai!

In the last 45 days, have you smoked marijuana? Have you been in the downdraft of someone who's smoked marijuana? Have you been in close quarters with someone who recently smoked marijuana?

Congratulations! You may have detectable amounts of THC in your bloodstream, and thus be eligible for 4 years in prison! Because that counts as possession!

What's that? You live in Vancouver? Or The Netherlands? There's no escaping pot smoke where you live?

Well, you might get lucky.

Yeah, so anyhow: Dubai isn't a safe place for Westerners to travel? No shit, Sherlock. What was your first clue?

Makes you feel satiated, maybe. I'd just run out of bread.

How would I lose weight by taking a bite every 30 seconds? That's about 20 sandwiches an hour....

Prize winnings in Canada are tax-free unless you become a professional gambler, in which case you have to pay tax just like everyone else. You can win one poker tournament, no problem. But once you win your second, you'll have to pay tax on it.

If Ken Jennings had been Canadian, his winning streak was long enough that the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency might well have audited him and determined him to be a professional game show contestant.

Yeah, the SCOTUS ruled that this was legal back in '92. I was outraged by it then, and I'm still outraged by it.

"but one of the first threads created in the "I was wrongly censored" category? BoingBoing censorship."

It's not censorship; it's ownership. Having a comment deleted from a webforum is no more censorship than your letter to the editor not getting printed in the Times.

The Web is 15 years old; this should not be some startling new discovery. The existence of people who maintain such an ignorant sense of entitlement just blows my mind.

The first thing I thought when I saw the mascots was "Wow -- those look just like the little vegetable characters in Harvest Mania." (I'm a compulsive casual game player on pogo.com).

Sure enough, the same design company worked on both projects. They've got some real geek cred.

It's an absolutely false choice, Realcatholicmen. As has been proven again and again and again, torture is not a reliable means of getting information. Your choice is false: the choice is actually between letting 1000 people die, or torturing one suspect and letting 1000 people die.

And even this fantasyland scenario has to assume that you have absolutely verifiable knowledge that there is a bomb (and you won't) and that you are absolutely sure that your suspect knows where it is (and you won't).

According to Polish news reports Mr. Dziekański's mother was waiting for him outside the gate all the time (10 hours)

News reports that are incorrect; she drove back to Kamloops and was away from the airport for the 6 hours before his death.

The guy was violent, unpredictable -- and there is really no argument here that he was neither violent not unpredictable, as he was throwing things around and brandishing furniture -- unable to communicate with those around him and avoidant of the cops. And in an airport. 20 years ago, he'd have been shot in the head with a hollow-point bullet, the inquest would have taken a week, and we'd never have heard another word.

I don't think the cops can be faulted here. Yes, this man's death is unfortunate. Yes, it's unjust. But life ain't just.

Some of the questions and comments bewilder me, to be honest. Like: why wasn't an interpreter brought in? Well, for one thing, nobody in that room knew what language he was speaking. They were all saying that it was Russian, when it was in fact Polish. And then how many fluent Polish/English bilingual speakers are there in Vancouver? A few hundred, maybe? How many work as freelance translators? How many of them would be willing to be on-call? And then how many of them would be willing to accept the potential liability commuicating with a violent and unpredictable man?

As for the police: how are the police supposed to deal with a violent, unpredictable man? Swarm him and risk injury? or deal with him from a distance and minimze the chance of injury both to themselves and to the suspect? That's exactly what they did: minimized the chance of injury. Unfortunately, the dice came up snake eyes.

The idea that this video "vindicates" the RCMP's "slander" is laughable at best and filled with an agenda at worst.

Me, I have no agenda: I don't trust the cops. My gut always tells me that they're bullies with too much power. But they did exactlyt he right thing here, and the video, IMHO, proves it.

Except that Wowhead was recently bought by ZAM. ZAM used to own IGE but no longer does...except that the two companies just might be owned by the same people. There's a lot of haze and grey in the 'divestiture' of IGE by ZAM.

So how it boils down is like this: you can't use Thottbot, Allakhazam or Wowhead without some reasonable risk that a pedophile scumbag isn't making money from pageviews.

A computer can't be 100% optimal at poker, but if you have enough bots running enough games, they'll pay off and pay off well.

I quit playing online poker when I realized that no human could possibly play 20+ tables at once -- and yet, several 'people' were doing so at any given time, even on the big sites like PokerStars.

So I'd watch these 'players'. Sometimes they'd go bust, but more often that not they'd double or triple their stake and then move to another room. The people owning those accounts were making thousands of dollars per day, playing on low-limit tables.

Between the bots, and the collusion between players, I was lucky to break even in my career.

For me, the total value of music is about $800, which was the cost of the six 1-TB hard drives I filled up (over a couple of months, mostly via sneakernet), just on the off chance that the Harper government made audio sharing illegal. So Now I'm set for life (at least, for anything that's on the market right now.)

Cory@4, I didn't imply that GW legally had the power to enjoin retailers from doing so. What they can do, however, is choose to stop selling product to distributors and retailers who don't kowtow to their demands, since there is (essentially) no retailer in the US with pockets deep enough to fight them.

This is actually not a new phenomenon in the world of genre gaming. Games Workshop, the manufacturer of (among others) the Warhammer series of tabletop miniatures games, has been limiting retailers to a 20% discount for years, even since before the Spreme Court ruling. At about the same time, GW also prohibited online stores from using GW intellectual property (such as logos, catalogue photos, and trademarks, etc.) in online catalogues. This restriction has even included a prohibition against listing the names of products in an online catalogue, most of which are trademarked (ex. "Eldar" or "Skaven" or "Necron"). Meanwhile, GW owns its own chain of branded retail stores and operates its own mailorder operations.

The upshot of this has been that consumers who want discounted GW products have to go to independent retailers online, ordering without being able to use a shopping cart system, and with a maximum discount of 20%. If you want to order from a catalogue online, you have to go through GW directly. With no discount.

This is, of course, nuts, but GW has deep pockets and no online retailer has the bucks to fight it. It'd be like PepsiCo refusing to allow an online grocery store from having an online catalogue that listed "2L bottle Diet Pepsi", "2L bottle Pepsi Max", etc. And then setting a minimum price for any orders received by e-mail. And then opening their own stores.

Canadian online retailers have had fewer restrictions because the Competition Act prevents GW Canada from such shenanigans. So there exist a couple of Canadian outfits which discount at up to 35%, with full listings of GW products. But none of them have picture catalogues using GW catalogue photos.

He was throwing chairs and equipment. As such, he had to be subdued from a distance. That leaves exactly two options: taser or gun. One is less likely to cause permanent injury or death than the other.

Pick one.

This is the choice the cops had, and it was the only choice. There is a system that Canadian cops follow, and it's laid out in print, in black and white. Whether the guy has a knife or a paperweight or a piece of furniture, if he cannot or will not respond to orders to desist, he is to be subdued at range.

It's unfortunate that the guy is dead, yes. But the cops did exactly the right thing and I predict that even if there is an independent inquiry, this will be borne out.

Because I'm paranoid and have a longstanding net.presence, I want to let it be known that I am neither Craig Cowling nor "Naughty James", even though my given name is James Cowling and I am naughty.

Thanks for sullying the family rep, shitstain.

Ry pprs t hv lrdy cnsmd svrl f ths bckts nd s xctd by th prspct f nthr.

I don't see how this is controversial. If someone with whom I do business chooses to badmouth me in public, I'm going to stop doing business with that person, regardless of who is paying whom and regardless of who benefits the most from that business relationship.