As everyone seems to be thinking, this is utter nonsense. What the hell made this a 'fake' company? Sure, you can do an IPO with your 'art project' buddies as a lark using all made-up plans and products... but once you are incorporated and you've got a whole bunch of products and people are buying them and investing in you... you have a REAL company, at least by the standards by which we (as nations) define such corporate entities. Even if it started as a fraud, even if it continues to be fraudulent - it's not FAKE! This guy sounds like a douche. Enron and Worldcom aren't considered 'fake' companies just because they were cooking the books and selling stock based on stuff they didn't have. They're just fraudulent companies, and now they're companies that don't exist anymore. Don't see how this is ANY different.

they're sprues.
should have been sanded off in the factory.

Seriously though, the mistaken notion of what this product is would be a much better product. (Get on the horn to the USPTO, BB!) What kind of moron wants to carry around a fake club full of piss? One could also easily just drill a hole in the bottom of this thing.

@2: I thought the same thing when I read it. I mean, how can they include caveats like (after rebate) and (not really unlimited) without at least a *little* of the customary bitching?

'protect minors from drugs!'

heh, just one more incentive for yon teenagers to smoke a spliff instead of going through all the hassle of getting some semi-'legal' intoxicants!

mmmm, capsaicin. nom nom nom!

I just hope they proofread the history blurbs before the game sees a release....

http://www.no2id.net/news/pressRelease/release.php?name=IDCardCoercion

I didn't RTFA quite as deeply as I needed to, and now that I've read the site above this begins to make more sense. The usage of a term like 'coercion' in this document literally contradicts assertions by numerous UK politicians on the topic of whether or not there would be 'compulsory' registration for the ID program. Polemicists that they are, the NOID folks seem to think that there's a pretty unambiguous contradiction here. Which is certainly true in a sense (coercion is practically the same thing as legal compulsion), but what I said above also holds true: the politicians' bullshit avoids being an outright 'lie' insofar as this is not 'compulsion,' pure and simple. Instead, it's really the bundling of a so-called 'service' that citizens may really *not* want into a service that they not only want, but more or less 'need' (ie. drivers' licences and such).

So I guess it's a lot like DRM on a grand scale. (You might, of course, say we don't 'need' cultural productions, but there's a lot of idiots who read Pitchfork daily that might disagree with you)

'Coercion' is a red-flag word indeed (unless you're reading political philosophy, in which case it gets tossed around like nobody's business), but I can't really make sense of exactly what is so ominous about the cited passage. They're going to 'coerce' citizens into getting these cards by making them compulsory in order to get certain other government documents? That doesn't seem like a totally huge deal on the face of things: certainly, as one poster commented above, it's not as big a deal as if it was actually legally compulsory for every citizen.

It's not this odd term 'coercion' that's a sticking point for me. Two things stand out as making this especially problematic: this really *isn't* overt coercion in the same way as a nationwide law would be, as a politically unpopular move which would certainly mobilize some resistance. Rather, it seems like a way of surreptitiously sneaking this ID card system in by a back door - far worse than if it was simple and obvious coercion. So it's really great that this government sneakiness has been exposed for all to see.

The other big red flag for me is the vocabulary of the document. It's kind of telling that it needs all the notes that have been added... It would be very, very difficult to figure out what's even going on in this document without the benefit of captioning. I've always known that government spoke in the tongues of business, but this seems to be taking it to a new level. All in all, it's very, very Orwellian - not in the '1984' sense (yet), but in the 'Politics and the English Language' sense.

What a silly comment from Time. Maybe Harvey was the first "openly gay" politician to be elected to an American office in the history of our usage of such ridiculous terminology... but you can be damn sure that in the history of Greco-Roman 'democracy' there have been any number of people elected to public office with a publicly-known proclivity for sexual conduct with others of their gender. Heck, at times in ancient Athens, open homosexual conduct with young boys was a *requirement* for public office.

Of course, the quote from Time is really rather perceptive, so long as we recognize that it's a distinctly modern phenomenon to slap a character-defining signifier like "gay" or "straight" onto an individual. As Foucault argued so persuasively in 'History of Sexuality,' there was indeed (if any of us can imagine) a very long period of history in which one's erotic liaisons were *not* considered in these terms. 'Homosexuality' as such is indeed a distinctly modern phenomenon, insofar as it's only quite recent that society has demanded that sexuality be described and categorized according to definite terminology....

Anything in Canada that is marketed as a quote unquote 'energy drink' (ie has a ton of caffeine) has to have the caffeine content posted on the can, along with any other pseudo-'medicinal' ingredients. I think there is actually a cutoff point at which something has to be considered an energy drink, since Mountain Dew in Canada has no caffeine, and during the brief interval they tried to introduce the drink with caffeine, it was marketed as an energy drink, complete with caffeine mg's on the label.

On my last trip to the states, I was surprised that even those massive cans of Rockstar and other energy drinks you guys have don't even post the caffeine amounts. I think that our regulatory agencies are trying to promote public health, but it really has the opposite effect for me... I'm always looking for the one with the most caffeine!