And every time I go out of the door and press the doorhandle, it opens. This must mean that the doorhandle is actually feeling my touch and that it is sentient. No wait...

The fact that an object reacts when it's touched does not mean the object knows it is being touched. Modern computers aren't any more sentient than typewriters and calculators. Sure, they are really fancy typewriters and even fancier calculators, but we are far from creating any sort of sentient machine.

Not to brag or anything, but damn that's expensive. Here in northern europe, the prices are roughly as follows:

4,90 euros = 6,6 dollars for unlimted data with a maxium speed of 321 kbit/s
9,90 euros = 13,2 dollars for unlimited data with a maxium speed of 1 Mbit/s
14,90 euros = 20,1 dollars for unlimited data with a maxium speed of 15 Mbit/s (with HSPA)

Now, I understand that most mobile usres don't really have the need for unlimited data if they only browse the net and read emails, but it boggles my mind how the cheapest packet for merely 200 megs is twice the price of the cheapest unlimited packet here. Wtf?

You missed something extremely important there.

I'm sorry, but that is just flatout wrong.

The majority of trade laws and laws relating to agriculture/production come from Brussels. But even under the Lisbon treaty the EU has no power whatsoever to impose criminal laws on its member nations. Therefore, even if the EU wanted to force police-state like control over its citizens, it has no means of doing so. EU does try to promote international police co-operation through Europol but Europol is just an organazation transfering and managing information, it has no rights to do arrests or search homes etc - all it can do is try and help local police forces to locate wanted high-profile criminals by relaying information from foreign agencies.

Don't get wrong, I'm as worried as the next /. about these kinds of projects but despite all the scaremongering the EU isn't quite as scary as you seem to think it is.

So what are you implying? That instead of giving any money at all to Blizard they should've just kept playing for free? If you read the guys post you'd have noticed he said that they didn't have the money to pay 50$ or more for the game because they had no jobs. Point is, they wanted to support the company that made the games, because they liked the game. Why did they like it? Because they got to try it and found out it was good. Why did they get to try it? Because of piracy.

Without piracy it's altogether likely (not certain, but likely) that these guys would not have bought the game at all. Moreover, your analogy of "stealing" is inherently flawed, because people wait for prices of products to drop all the time. I for example, would like to get a PS3 at some point, but I am not getting it before the price comes down a bit. If I end up buing it at a lower price in the future do you call that stealing?

My point is, since they guys had little or no money to spend on games they would've waited for the prices to drop anyways. Piracy "cost" Blizzard nothing - if anything it ensured that they bought the game.

Of course there are always going to be people who are just going to play for free and not buy anything, I'm not denying that. But those people are not the target audience of game manufacturers - you can't force people to buy stuff they have no interest in paying for. You can, however, create a product so good that a part of people who wouldn't have bought it otherwise will end up buing it*. Even if they buy it at a lower price that's still money made, not money lost.

*studies have shown that people who pirate music for example, spend, on average, more money on music than people who don't pirate. Source.

But in Soviet Russia, the cyrrillic alphabets understand Slashdot.

Sorry to nitpick here, but I feel this is kind of important, even if it's just a matter of semantics.

No, we all live our lives in different ways. Unless one believes in some kind of supreme metaphysical being against all evidence, then the only purpose our lives have is one that we assign to ourselves.

I couldn't personally give a damn about Bejeleweled, or tv for that matter, and I wouldn't waste my time on them, but if somebody gains fulfilment and happiness from doing so then why should it be called a waste of his time? That's right, it shouldn't.

End of existential rant.

The problem is that the hide button doesn't allow you to hide certain type of news from the feed (at least not anymore). You can hide entire applications, and entire actions of persons from showing up. I would love to be able to hide notices such as "person X commented on person Y's message" or "Person X likes person Y's status", and so on - because I don't care about them and I think they're just adding crap to my news feed - but if I click "hide" it will hide all the messages of the said person.

I don't use facebook much at all - and the shitty interface is one of the biggest reasons for that.

Although this is slightly off-topic, I'd just like to point out to all /. readers who might be wondering about his name: Ilkka Karttunen is actually a Finnish name. I have no idea if the guy has moved into the UK from Finland or if his parents/relatives have come from here. Well, idiots like him are pretty evenly split between nations anyway, so his nationality doesn't really make a difference. But I know there are people out there who went "What kind kind of name is that for a guy from Essex O.o?".

And forcing a child to be born into a family that didn't want a child in the first place is a much, much worse of an affront to humanity.

If two adults are honest enought to confess that they made a mistake and that they're not ready for them huge responsibility of having and raising a child no humane society should punish them - and the child at the same time - for that mistake by forcing them to keep the child.

Actually, I think there are more people here from outside of the US (mainly Europe) than you think. I think it's closer to a 50-50 ratio. And this is why:

Exhibit A) If you look at this poll you'll see that 43% of all voters chose the option "I Use Celsius, You Insensitive Clod!", which would obviously imply that they are not from the States.

Exhibit B) I'm Finnish (been browsing /. actively for a couple of years now) and I know I'm by far not the only Finn lurking around here. Moreover, if you look at, for example, the stories that have something to do with the US healthcare system there always seems to be an abundance of Swedes, Brits, Canadians and (more rarely though) us Finns trying to explain how "socialist healthcare" really isn't such an infernal thing as some of you Americans think it is.

Erm. Why is the "consent" of your fellow citizens needed? Laws - in any democratic country - are crafted by people who have been democratically selected to represent the people. If someone breaks these laws he/she deserves a punishment. However, wether or not he indeed commited the crime he is acused of is not a matter of oppinion. Why should it be open for a vote? There either is or is not enough evidence to condemn the man, and people who have been given the proper training in lgeal issues (ie. judges and prosecutors) should be able to determine that.

By giving complete laymen control over wether or not the suspect is guilty, an additional factor is added to the process. Trials are not only about reviewing the evidence, they're about convincing people that your view is correct. It's a show where both sides have to try to appeal to the basic human insticts like empathy. Both sides are trying to manipulate the jury's feelings and because emotions affect one's judgement the decissions of the jury could be far from objective (of course a trial can never be 100% objective, but I still don't think that a jury based system is the best alternative).

I say it's not the best alternative because it isn't working that well. In fact I'd go as far as saying that it's a failure, since the USA has the highest murder rate of all the industrialized countries, the highest amount of prisoners in the world. Especially the latter statistic is in my oppinion partially explained by the fact that people seek revenge, they want the "bad guys" off the streets and hence a jury of laymen is more likely to find a man guilty than a system which doesn't use juries.

For example: Germany - and many other European countries - uses a system where the judge is assisted by two lay judges on the lowest level and two other judges on higher levels of the legal system. Germany has nearly six times lower murder rate than the USA and only 1/7 of the prisoner amount of the USA.

So could someone please explain why is this "consent of one's fellow citizens" a good thing for the criminal (who is more likely to get imprisoned) and most importantly for the society itself since it doesn't seem to be very effecting in reducing crimes?

I'm always curious about whether or not these kind of treaties only restrict the number of warheads or the total yield of the arsenal. Of course, less nukes is always good, but if the agreement only says you must have less nukes, it doesn't stop you from making those nukes even more powerful.

I have had two gmail accounts for a couple years now. One of them has my name on it (in the form of: "firstname.lastname@gmail.com") and the other is a nick (not the same as my /. one) that I often use in forums/games. Curiosuly enough, neither of these accounts gets any spam at all. And by this I don't mean that the spam filters are effective because there is no to be filtered. I can understand that my name based account doesn't get spam, after all I rarely give it out to anyone except people I know in person and very important sites (mostly web-stores that require my full name anyways) that I trust. However, I use my nick based email on nearly all forums and sites that require an email address during registration and despite that, I only get mail from those sites. No unwanted viagra adds or anything. Now I know from earlier comments and stories such as this that spam is a huge problem to many people. So am I just incredibly lucky? I honestly don't know.

The only thing I have consciously done to avoid being spammed is that I have never typed my adress directly to any forum post/site. In fact, most forums allow you to hide the email address, and even the sites that option of sending email to other users usually require registration to see the adress and have methods such as CAPTCHAS in place to prevent bots from getting in to harvest the addresses. If somebody asks for my email I'll just send it to them via private message or similar method instead of leaving it "in public view".

Like I said, I have no idea if I'm just lucky or something, but spam has never been a problem for me.

Seriously. Mod this guy insightful. After all, it's the only way to be sure. ;-)

(Score:3, Interesting)

That, my fellow nerds, is why I love slashdot. This is about the only place in the world where such comment is (rightfully) seen as interesting.

Stuff that matters!