And guess what? A motorcycle has the best attributes of both a bicycle and a car.

Lane-splitting is legal in CA, so I'm not sure what the bicycle people are trying to prove since most cagers in LA are probably used to seeing a cycle go by regularly.

It's all whiz-bang futuristic and all, but if the problem is buying your bike back from the same people over and over, I think a few carefully chosen beatdowns from the bike riding community might be a better and cheaper solution.

How do you smoke pot from a skull?

Give me a skull and I'll come up with something. I've made bongs with worse materials.

I don't really get the big freak out over online transactions. As long as you double-check who you're sending money to, it's safe enough. My credit card has never had a problem taking of bogus charges. It sucks that it happens, but I'd prefer computers handle the transactions over people.

We all gasp at the thought of online theft but will gladly hand over our credit card info to a human. When I did some phone work and took payments I could have been writing down a personal copy of the number, ask for the verification code, and then the address from the computer. Where's the outcry against humans?

Let me try to expand on my post some. I've drawn some attention. The internet must be working, or failing depending on your point of view. In the great sea of content, I've managed to stand out in this puddle for a brief second. Would that mean that whatever I wrote, wrong or right, has been more thought provoking or at least entertaining? That I warranted replies mean that my words had more value when considering the interaction as a whole?

I'd say that Fox news learned a thing or two from the internet and not the other way around. Love it or hate it, the inflamatory gets attention over the most well-reasoned statement. So when I write on discussion boards, I paint with a broad brush and prefer to get some sort of validation for my effort.

And that leads into a big aspect of having so many producers. Do we all do it for just the fullfilment? I honestly hope we get there some day, but despite the promises of the newsreels, robots and computers have not reduced the amount of time I spend at work. Then I go maintain a household, maintain my body, and hope I have enough energy left over to do something more worthwhile than watch TV.

Sometimes the waking sleep of TV is all I can handle. If we want to equate down time with wasting brain cycles, then where do you draw the line? Is 8 hours of sleep too much when 4 will keep you alive? REM sleep lights up more of the brain than reading, arguably making it a superior activity, but then most people go and waste the time by not recalling all of their dreams.

If we were a monoculture we'd get even more done because we wouldn't be wasting time arguing about Bush vs. everyone or which version of Dungeons and Dragons is the best. Why do we draw the arbitrary line at TV? You can't have YouTube without the original tube.

Elitism... Sure. What else can you call it when you judge someone else's choices that don't impinge on you? We can talk about 95% crap and almost never reach consensus on what 95% is actually crap. We can all cite our IQ scores and feel smug, but history will forget almost all of us.

I'm potentially just as good a writer or better than Cory Doctorow. The difference is that he has the drive or ego or whatever to consistently put himself out there and never stop. I took the easy route and got a cushy IT job. Five percent of the world thinking you're talented is a huge number, but 95% thinking you make crap is even larger. If we want to encourage open contribution, then we should probably stop being so harsh in our criticism.

I really wasn't trying to argue that TV is better or worse than reading a book or crocheting genitalia, just that any medium can suffer from mediocrity and the new thing isn't without flaws. I'm on the side of creativity over TV, but the notion that I'm wasting time by not working to my full potential is a demon that keeps me up at night and ultimately, from being creative.

There's nothing new under the sun, including this debate.

Let's all remember to read the Onion article titled, "Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television and cut down on the elitism.

Some people mention trading movies for TV, but what's the difference? There's plenty of crap movies and 2 hours of watching is still 2 hours watching something. Same can be said of the theatre, live music, etc.

We can even say the same thing about books. You're either reading just the classics (the merit of what makes them classic can be debated), or you're reading stuff that may or may not be crap. Is Mercedes Lackey or the latest Star Trek novel really better than TV? At least you only spend an hour on a bad TV show. Books take longer to read.

And then there's the internet. For every worthwhile blog post or discussion thread there's probably 50-100 inane posts about cat barf or flame wars. We can celebrate the creator, but these elitists who want us to kill our TVs will still look down their noses at the likes of pregnant Snape erotica or those LOLcat things the unenlightened masses drool over.

The fate of the internet is likely no different than any other medium. It'll be commercialized to a variable extent. It will expand and more of the average people will be drawn in as the barrier to entry is lowered. With all that audience more, and more varied content will be produced.

And now you have this great sea of content and we have the same problem as TV- One thousand channels, maybe a dozen really good shows, and a whole lot of leftovers of varying quality. Then you add all the filtering mechanisms to only get the "good" content. You might as well be reading TV Guide.

Those unwashed masses watching TV after a day at the office are the same masses that sat around the hearth telling re-runs about Zeus after a hard day building an aqueduct. The revered Shakespeare wrote for the TV of his time and wasn't critically acclaimed early on. I bet he even took a day off occasionally, especially once writing became his day-job.

So here I am. I've spent a bunch of time writing a reply in a discussion about a talk. Have I wasted this time? Was this expenditure any more noble than if I were contemplating the theme of a TV show? Is this just digital graffiti that may one day be praised because it managed to survive the passage of time where other hard drive sectors failed? Maybe I'm a dullard that spends his time behind a screen sharing his opinion when all the enlightened people know that the only true way is to shout it from the center of ye olde town square. It'll never end.

Maybe we should spend some of that cognitive surplus trying to get over ourselves.

I don't see what all the fuss is about. Sure, it's more restrictive than the original OGL, but it's still better than nothing, which is what most other RPG companies offer.

The most important thing to know right now is: THE LICENSE HASN'T BEEN MADE PUBLICLY AVAILABLE YET. EVERYTHING IS SPECULATION!

If you made a successful game based on the OGL, then all WotC is asking you to do is stand behind your work, or dump it if you want to ride their coattails. Why should 3rd party publishers get free support from Wizards in the form or co-opting all the R&D and risk without being asked to give something in return?

Have the people that complain about WotC ever heard of Palladium Books? The guy that runs that company has been known to send nasty/lawyer letters to anyone that attempts to post some fan material online. Does White Wolf have any sort of license that allows use of their IP?

If you don't like the license, write your own material, license it however you want, and let it stand on its merits.

I mean this in the nicest possible way, but fuck the blind. I won't go out of my way to make a site inaccessible and when it comes to butting heads with the marketers over flash vs. substance I'm for substance every time. BUT, the blind are such a small portion of the population they aren't worth catering to exclusively. If a business wants to miss out on any possible income from the blind, that's their problem.

Why not get a real sensory isolation tank?

You could get some MOLLE gear and piece it together however you want.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOLLE_(military)

Goatse man would love these things.

Crap like this is why we have a 2nd amendment.

We have the Alamo Drafthouse for that in Austin and spreading through the rest of Texas. http://drafthouse.com/

Less upscale, but good pub food, beer and wine. They also focus on fun and unique things like sing-alongs and Mister Pancake Theatre (live MST3K).

If they have a locked cockpit, there's no reason they shouldn't carry their guns with an empty chamber. That would make accidental discharge impossible.

Of course a properly handled firearm with a round in the chamber should also not accidentally discharge. The pilot did something stupid.

Most people go camping to get away from the world. Why not just enjoy the nature? The only tech to bring is a good DSLR.

What? No mention of christians yet? If the ultra-conservative side of that religion had their way we'd be doing the same things here in the USA.

It's technically a cake, but really, it's a marzipan sculpture. Has anyone ever tasted one of these things? Are they worth eating, or is it just piles of generic yellow cake encased in marzipan?

Pretty dumb. Overload your pot so nothing cooks properly.

SPOON!

Lectroid:

I think you want the iPod touch with the new software upgrade.

So what happens if you choose not to answer any of their friendly questions? Doesn't the 5th amendment gives us that right. I don't think I want to be the test case though.

I like this concept and it looks like the right price/performance for my non-audiophile needs, but are there any recommendations for speakers to pair with it?

You could have almost zero waste and no recycling if you used a straight razor. I switched a year ago and like it much better than any multi-blade razor.

It takes a bit of practice and has a higher up-front cost, but a single blade will last a lifetime. It's much harder to cut yourself than hollywood portrays.

Does using mono-space for everything mean that you use two spaces after the period? If so, do you remove all those extra spaces when converting to a variable-width font?

The rules of typography are 2 spaces for mono and one space for variable after a period.