I gladly accept correction, so I have no problem with your intent, if not your tone.

We all go "full dick" sometimes, though, so, no worries. :)

But the article makes it clear that "Neither the police or Project Sunblock are paying the website in question to display the police message". They're just suppressing the banner display, and displaying a police message instead.

Yep, I made a mistake. I presumed that the police would know better than to enter into a conspiracy to commit outright theft of service and libel in their efforts to appease the recording industry. One crime doesn't justify another. Mea culpa.

Except, in your zeal to find something in my post to go all "princess of vitriol" over, you seem to have failed to notice my key point - No one visiting piracy sites mistakes them for legit. Would you care to respond to that, or would you prefer to latch on to a typo somewhere in this post?


Pathetic is deciding you know how the system works without R'ing TFA

"The system" has rules we can know a priori. The police can't just choose to ignore them out of expediency. "Pathetic is" accepting criminal behavior just because it carries a thin veneer of official approval.

This should serve as a cautionary tail of what can happen when you go into business with friends and or relatives. As soon as big money starts being made...unfortunately the greedy side of human nature tends to rear it's ugly head.

The arrangement made sense right up until TSR actually started making real money. When you and your friends bust your asses to build a business, and have no substantial income or assets to fight over, running it as a labor-of-love makes perfect sense. But once they started bulk-hiring new staff and pulled off 5000% growth over five years - Why the hell didn't they hire a competent CFO???

No one in the inner circle had a clue about how to run a business, because they all wanted control to remain in the hands of gamers - Hey, cool, most of us can appreciate that concept. But they could have avoided all the acrimony and eventually selling out to Wizards-of-the-CCG simply by bringing in someone with a clue in a non-shareholding executive capacity.

Sad, really.

Police said the ads would make it harder for piracy site owners to make their pages look authentic

No one confuses Rapidshare for BMG's official site. People go there specifically to download pirated content, full stop. Seeing police ads might scare a few people with the paranoia of thinking "the man" has caught them, but the other 99% of visitors will just thank the police for subsidizing their favorite warez sites.

Truly pathetic, Boys in Blue (Hmm, do Bobbies wear blue?)


The move comes as part of a continuing effort to stop piracy sites from earning money through advertising.

By... Um... Buying banner ads on piracy sites? BRILLIANT!

Don't do it! Everyone will be diagnosed.

Bizarre trolling aside, You have the right idea - Virtually everyone over the age of 50 has dozens of "cancerous" cell clusters scattered around their bodies, all more-or-less harmless unless juuust the right combination of environmental conditions triggers a few to start growing (and spreading) uncontrollably.

I find it easy to believe that a universal test for "cancer" would have a near-perfect success rate, because nearly everyone has it, to some degree. I find the negative side much harder to believe, because it means differentiating between cancer-but-harmless and cancer-gonna-kill-you.

Or looked at another way, consider recent changes in attitude regarding breast and prostate cancers. 20 years ago, detecting either meant immediately scheduling a radical mastectomy/prostatectomy. Today, unless you have a family history of aggressive cancers, your oncologist will likely suggest watching and waiting for at least a few months to see if it actually does anything more that sit there harmlessly. Yet, even if it does - still cancer. Much like we don't universally vaccinate people against TB because it makes TB antibody tests diagnostically useless, I see this test as having the same issue, accurate but useless.

How does that work with a free game?

Ha ha, as I said, once you redefine the words you can claim all sorts of nonsense.

1927, New Century Dictionary
Inflation: "The act of inflating, or the state of being inflated, specifically expansion or increase of the currency of a country by the issuing of paper money especially paper money not redeemable in specie or that is insufficiently secured by precious metal."

Not even a mention of prices.

Deflation is defined as the opposite of inflation.

Of-course the earlier in the dictionary world you go the more correct the definition, and the closer to the present, the more propaganda and nonsense is added to the definition, inserting the level of prices into definition of expansion and contraction of money supply. Prices do not inflate or deflate of-course, only total supply of money inflates and deflates. Inflation and deflation are changes in the measurement units, not changes in the economic output. Once you redefine the meanings of the words you lose all meaning altogether.

Once you ask the wrong question it doesn't matter what the answer is.

No, you are the idiot. Deflation is not a price but is a monetary phenomena. As I said, wilful ignorance. Good luck.

If someone is secretly manipulating or shaping information to push a preferred outcome it first needs to be secret to have any true effects. Without the secrecy you are free to evaluate the posted information with the knowledge that someone is trying to influence your opinion by excluding certain pieces of information or posts in this particular case. If you recognize this pattern you are free to go to another source for information. Unfortunately there are far to many news outlets or websites pushing their own agendas and partisan editorial lines instead of facts. A lot of folks can not recognize fact from opinion and tend to gravitate towards sources that publish information that validates their pre-determined opinion while ignoring any information that contradicts their stated opinion. You have the far right and far left and everything in between supposedly reporting on or describing the same thing but the information they publish turns out looking like the people providing the information all live in their own little universe. Web forums are notorious echo chambers where facts tend to get in the way. "Winning" the argument comes before facts. Most popular news sources and web sources are becoming adept at using "lies of omission" to shape their stories. This allows them to state that everything they published was factually correct which in a sense would be true but the information omitted could have put a whole different slant on the argument.

And it does not "ban" any people, innocent or otherwise. It bans anonymous edits from an IP. That isn't a person. That is just one of the many ways of making edits. It certainly isn't a "ban" as they still get "use" of Wikipedia, reading and otherwise. They just can't edit, anonymously, from that IP. Edit anonymously from home, or get a login. It's not a hardship to anyone.

Just because you advertise it as being something doesn't mean it is or needs to be? Nope. That's false advertising.

Nope. The corporate owners can take their corporate profits and have speech. The question was about the corporation having its own voice, above and beyond that of the employees of it (with tax implications of using pre-tax money for post-tax activities).

Of-course I completely forgot to mention all of the service prices that are rising, from accounting, to lawyers, to court fees, to mailing, to education, to car repair, etc.

Did I forget to mention coffee and coffee shops?

Obviously water

They will talk about drought and bandits and weather and climate and every single excuse under the Sun except for the actual real cause of this nonsense: inflation.

You are not buying stuff at the same price as 6 years ago, maybe you should actually pay attention to the receipts.

beef, pork, avocado, fruits, veggies, almonds, pinenuts, walnuts, mozarella, cheddar, other cheeses, seafood, grains, soy, soy, palm oil, milk, gasoline, beer and more beer, limes, canadian bacon, barley, restaurants, restaurants, restaurants,electrical energy, car rentals, hotel rooms, cab fairs,

air travel and air travel gets more expensive in many other ways, various extra fees, less room, more seats on planes

aluminium, nickel, zinc, steel, natural gas

I can do this all day, I just don't want to waste that much time on you.

See, maybe you are not doing your own shopping, that's possible, if you can afford a butler then maybe you don't need to worry about prices and you never notice what others do. In the real world the prices are going up.

It is not only local USA prices that are going up of-course, globally prices are going up, assets and goods being bid up by ever increasing money supply, which the globe prints in response to the printed US dollar.

I wonder what it's like to live in such a thick bubble.

It's obvious you do not have a clue about what real "censorship" is. So a website rejects posts that do not meet their basic and usually very low standards you agree to when posting there, BFD. On the other hand under real censorship the site would not even exist in the first place and if you tried to start one in some countries you would have state security knocking on your door.