It's especially bad as it turns out Sen. Smith was actually a judge in a cat show, and was, in preparation for a contest, scoring some of his friends' cats at his apartment to familiarise himself with the scoring system.

Naturally, of course, all the context is thrown out of the window when people want to protest something.

I've been very interested in politics since I was 15 or 16 or so (23 now). Around the same point, I realised that, while not likely, it was still entirely possible that I might end up in a position where something I wrote on the internet will bite me in the arse 10+ years later. Since that realisation, I've been generally trying to keep myself from writing anything too embarrassing, or political on the internet. Still, I find it amusing, in the theoretically incredibly unlikely event I end up as Prime Minister or something important, people combing over posts I made on a Pokemon message board when I was 12. Or protesting that I supported something silly when I was 14. (OMG, look at this, the PM posted some weird pro-British Empire stuff when he was 14, he must be a closet racist!)

So yeah, for the past 6 or 7 years, most of the stuff I've posted has been gaming related, or generally politically neutral. There are a few wild things from when I was 12-15, and I'm sure I've slipped up and posted something stupid since then.

I guess it's the whole hysterical global warming contingent, that likes to blame everything on global warming. Too many hurricanes? Global warming. Too few hurricanes? Global warming. Heat wave? Global warming. Cold snap? Global warming.

Plus, many actual environmentalists I've met tend to be trying to use it as a cover for some sort of Marxism, and generally appear to me, at least, favor words over action. That and what generally appears to be hypocrisy (Al Gore taking a private jet to a conference to warn about carbon emissions.)

So basically, environmentalists make me distrust environmentalism. It's a pretty terrible reason, I'll admit, but it happens. I imagine, similarly, there are a great many people more turned off of religion by fanatics and fundamentalists than by the actual doctrines.

The Aral Sea is a horrifying and very visible example of the scale of what humans can do when their policies end up destroying the environment. A major lake, once the fourth largest in the world, reduced to almost nothingness in just a few decades. Unlikely to ever fully recover.

While I remain skeptical (but not outright dismissive) of many of the claims of the environmental movement, particularly the global warming and carbon footprint stuff, it's stuff like this that really makes me worried. If on a small scale people can do this, I really do worry what might happen on a larger scale.

One thing I've never really understood is why there is such a strong belief among many people that MMOs are a huge waste of time and suck the life out of people. I play WoW an average of two hours a day, judging from my /played time. Most of my co-workers seem to think I have no life because of this. (I have no life, but it's not because of WoW.) Most information I've seen shows the average American watching five or so hours of TV a day. I really fail to see why MMOs are considered so terrible by many people, but watching that much TV isn't...

On that note, WHAT THE HELL DO PEOPLE WATCH FOR FIVE HOURS A DAY, EVERY DAY? Do they just get home from work, turn on the TV, and watch it until they go to sleep? I'd be hard pressed to find five hour long shows to watch every day. Even with DVDs of my favorite shows, I can recall very, very few times where I've watch five hours of television in a single day, let alone every day for life...

*Shrug* I personally prefer the PS3 controller (own both systems). The 360 controller still seems big and bulky to me, and the d-pad is pretty much worthless.

The 360 one probably has a better layout, in theory, but for some reason (the two above don't fully answer it), I still prefer the PS3 controller. Not by a huge margin, but, yeah...

I'm a Canadian Army Reservist, so easily more than 25. Probably close to 50. They really do give you a ton of stuff...

I agree. I can't really comprehend the sheer hatred of Lucas by some members of the SW Fandom. I liked Original Trilogy. I liked the Prequel Trilogy. I didn't like the Prequel Trilogy as much as the Originals (although I do like RotS more than RotJ), but I still like both. As do most people I talk to who would count as "people who like Star Wars", if not "SW Fans". They just don't go on the Internet and post incoherent rage filled rants.

I was 11 when I saw The Phantom Menace in theaters. I liked Jar-Jar then (although these days I'm sort of embarrassed to admit it), as did most of my mildly nerdy 11 year old friends. I know many people (kids and parents of kids, mostly) who still like Jar-Jar. It's not like Lucas thought "You know who I hate? MY FANS!" and decided to do everything possible to make them hate Ep. I-III. A lot of the stuff that people don't like about Ep. I in particular (pod races, and such) I remember really liking when I was a kid, getting my parents to buy me toy pod racers, and spending hours playing the N64 pod racing game with my friends. While 11 years later, I no longer like Jar-Jar and think he was a mistake, I can see where Lucas was coming from. I'm fairly confident he was trying to recreate his success with making C3PO and R2D2 as comic relief characters. Actually, to be honest, I'm not really sure if I'd dislike Jar-Jar so much if I hadn't have ended up learning how much other people hated him.

Also, with the exception of the Greedo shooting thing, I really like the Special Editions. They came out a year after I saw VHS versions of the original movies, let us see the movies in theaters, made my brother and I buy a ton of Star Wars toys (which we still have), and hyped us up for Ep. I. They seemed to have served their purpose. I didn't even learn about the Greedo thing (and hence never cared) until like three years ago.

Either way, I agree with you on pretty much every count. Plus, from a sheer monetary point of view, my brother, me, and my friends were made to like Star Wars because of the Special Editions and the prequel trilogy. We bought toys, video games, other mechandise. Many of us still buy Star Wars stuff. (KotoR, Force Unleashed, Lego Star Wars, Thrawn Trilogy). I'm hesitant to call myself a Star Wars fan, if only because my view of a fan of anything (SW, Star Trek, Comics, Transformers, Fallout) is someone who goes on message boards and complains about every single change and rants about how much they hate every aspect of what they are a fan of. Hence, I try not to ever call myself a fan of something. Just "someone who enjoys X".

Oh, and I'm fully expecting some AC to call me worse than Hitler or something because I liked Jar-Jar when I was a kid. And bought Ewok toys when the Special Editions came out.

Heh, I've been running Windows 7 64 bit on my MacBook Pro for just over a year now, having downloaded the first public beta out of curiosity. IIRC, it took just a minor amount of tweaking to the get Vista drivers to work for Windows 7 beta.

On that note, I'm mildly dismayed to find Win7 ending up good enough to be used as my primary operating system, which as happened mostly because the DirectX World of Warcraft seems to run better than the OpenGL one for me. That and a few other programs. I feel dirty having OS X end up as my third most used OS on this computer. (Triple booting Ubuntu 9.10, Win7-64, OS X 10.6).

There are still large areas of North America stuck with either stone-age Dial-Up (in 20-freakin'-10) or slow expensive satellite. Like mine (I cry myself to sleep over my 1200ms latency) This is absolutely a no-go there. Obviously.

Now, in better places, I'm sort of out of the loop. Whenever I've spent time in cities, either visiting my brother in Ottawa or living in London (Ontario, not the good one) for a few months at a time, it's been my experience that even connections that are supposed to get up to 1MB/sec would be lucky to get that in practice, especially at peak times. Furthermore, the sheer amount of lagspikes, connection hiccups, or general time when the interrnet craps out for no apparent reason makes it seem like you'd be dealing with one frustration after another. The number of times I see people get DC'd on World of Warcraft seems to back up my theory that staying connected, and maintaining a constant connection at 5KB/s or so (for WoW) is difficult enough, doing the same for a (whopping?) 1/MB/s while keeping latency under 100ms would be hellish.

So is my experience with the Internet indicative of the general population, or have I just had the misfortune of having terrible service? Can people really keep 1MB/s sustained, without lag hiccups, DCs, lost packets, etc, while keeping under 100ms?