Didn't they teach cursive because it allowed you to write more quickly? If so, and if that's a valuable thing to teach, there should be classes on the new way to write more quickly - internet shorthand. : )

Those Video Games Live bastards owe me a hundred bucks. When I heard about it, I bought two tickets immediately. It sounded awesome. My wife and I showed up for the show and they had canceled it without any announcement, and refused to refund our money. Video Games Live said Ticketmaster had to refund it and Ticketmaster said Video Games Live had to.

Yikes. If they succeed, they're going to be creating a deeply sexually frustrated society, and that will be expressed in violence. But will that violence be directed inwards to revolution or outwards to war? Probably inwards since the government will be the source of the repression.

I agree that people like that live in a troubling tautology. But there's another thing at work here, and probably the most important and successful conspiracy working today - and that is the conspiracy to discredit conspiracy theorists. The popular opinion today is that conspiracy theorists are nutters, and that's a real boon to anyone involved in a conspiracy. If they're being investigated, there's already a prejudice to dismiss the investigator as crazy. How wonderfully useful.

A conspiracy is when two or more people enter into a secret agreement to do something illegal. This happens ALL THE TIME. No doubt everybody here has been involved in at least one conspiracy. You can barely get through adolescence without it. That everyone now has a knee-jerk reaction to think of anyone talking conspiracy is crazy is a coup for corruption.

Next Up: the new WoW 3.3 patch comes out next Tuesday, which will render this headline inaccurate.

You can't get to the end of something that has no end.

There are several core issues in regards to smoking that make it different in key respects from doing anything harmful to yourself.

1) I am all in favor of allowing things that damage oneself to be legal. That's the essence of the nanny-state discussion. So I'm with people who are against the idea of a nanny-state. BUT smoking is harmful to others. Go ahead and damage yourself, but when you damage others who have not given consent, that is crossing a line.

2) Smoking by its nature releases smoke into the air and is therefore the business of everyone that encounters that smoke. This smoke is a) addictive, b) nasty-smelling, c) a mind-altering substance, and d) causes cancer. To those who smoke, would be fine if a stranger a) put an addictive substance in your food without your consent, b) farted such a nasty fart near you that it stuck in your clothes for days, c) slipped mild mind-altering drugs into your food/drink, or d) released carcinogenic gases into your environment?

3) On mind-altering substances, I'm very much of the philosophy that people should be allowed to use them. But nobody should be allowed to MAKE me use them. Nicotine affects brain chemistry. While it may be a fix for you, it makes me feel ill and causes terrible head pain.

It's a no-brainer. The violent reaction from smokers to the thought of banning smoking from public places and even outside is no doubt related to the thought of being unable to get a fix with one of the most addictive chemicals known to man. Remove that, and you have a case where smoking causes obvious infringements to the people around you, each of which clearly should not be allowed.

If all smokers switched to the patch, the problem would be entirely solved in my mind. Do what you want, but keep it to yourself.

It's interesting that Expert Sex Change has come up so much on this thread, because essentially it sounds like Murdoch wants what they have - Google able to crawl all their news, but then when you click the link, the news isn't there - only a paywall. So this could be already accomplished in the same way.

Personally, I hope Murdoch gets his way. He seems dedicated to pulling his hateful FOX News out of the public eye, and that's undeniably a good thing.

I'm also pleasantly surprised to find I'm not the only one who is ceaselessly annoyed at seeing Expert Sex Change results on Google when looking for coding help.

Laugh while you can! When the robots develop religion, you'll find that they're creationists thanks to the Unix Epoch!

Hear hear!

Recently in Georgia a TV show we were watching (on Tivo, to boot) was interrupted for several minutes with a vague child abduction warning. No information at all was given about the child abduction - no description, no name, no last-seen location, nothing. Did they expect all of Georgia to run out into the streets looking for any old child? How did they expect people to act on this? Not only was it useless and pointless in the specific, but this is not the sort of thing an entire state needs to hear about.

In an age where everybody is interconnected with cell phones, IM, text messages, internet, Facebook, Twitter, and so on, if there's an emergency, a REAL emergency, I don't think anyone will have any trouble getting word of it. This system is entirely unnecessary and will be a real annoyance.

Mandelbroccoli