This was rather explicitly covered in Neal Stephenson's book The Diamond Age. In the Neo Victorian phyle, the higher social ranking a member has the less personalized their newspaper is due to the thought that there are certain things higher ups need to know and it's best if they were all on the same page.

Then again, the Vickies are also depicted as un-curious and possessing of a stagnant society, so take from that what you will.

R.I.P. Mitch

That's output from the 'ddate'—Discordian date—program.

No. I was not. Since you are the third person to have misinterpreted what I was saying, I must conclude it is my fault.

I was trying to point out that the reasoning behind opposing boycotts based on a company's support of DRM was flawed, by applying it to something damn near everybody is opposed to vehemently.

I don't think they are in any sane way comparable. I was using that fact to show that what the people who opposed boycotting because of DRM really meant was "this doesn't bother me enough to boycott and inconvenience myself" and not "you shouldn't boycott if it inconveniences you" as was implied by the wordings of many of the posters who thought that boycotting because of DRM was silly.

I really don't give a damn if anyone boycotts Lulu for any reason. My only goal was to point out the flawed reasoning being used.

Already there are a lot of comments like this in the general form of "just because company A, whom you do business with, starts to do something B that you find objectionable doesn't mean you should inconvenience yourself, especially if B doesn't directly affect your business dealing with them." It quite frankly baffles me.

What if the objectionable thing B was using slave labor for a product you do not use or buy? Does it suddenly become okay to continue the business relationship? I know there are huge differences in the offense, but the underlying argument is the same for both buying from a DRM encumbered goods provider and a slave created goods provider: "I don't directly deal in those products, so I will continue to buy other products from them and let the ones who DO buy them deal with the consequences."

Obviously—I hope—refusing to buying from a company with some products manufactured by slaves, even if the products you would be interested in aren't, would be a reasonable action. It is therefor clear that what people using the argument really mean is that they don't care about DRM enough to stop purchasing on priciple and don't thing you should either, and not that they actually think their argument really applies. In which case, they should really stop making the "boycotting is hard so don't do it" argument.

Isn't the entire point of patents to be a tutorial on how to accomplish what's described? Patents are there solely to combat the existence of trade secrets (using monopoly incentives to achieve this). It totally defeats the purpose to give a patent on something that does not inform a knowledgeable reader on how to implement the invention.

In that case, no device can ever be bricked, as they can function in the capacities of: paperweight, doorstop, or therapeutic stress relief target (you can hit it with a bat) just to name a few. If your pedantic definition of a word renders it nearly meaningless, then I don't see what problem you could possibly have with a more useful re-purposing of the word as something actually applicable.

His Noodliness would really rather you didn't.

My first thought upon reading that was a pleasant "Wow. That's pretty insightful." Then I was revolted upon reviewing it and coming to the same conclusion once again. Well done (and screw you for bringing me down ;-) )

Nineteen Eighty-Four has a very noticeable anti-censorship/information destroying bent to it. This is ironic because it's a coincidence that Nineteen Eighty-Four is the book being removed and it is contradictory in that one of the messages of the book is that information should not be removed which is humerus because it is so obviously going to attract bad publicity when it could have been avoided (yay for schadenfreude).

It's a bit like my boycott of stores that I know openly supported Prop 8 only on a governmental scale. Nokia et al. made deals that the US government thought were counter to it's own interests and goals and so it is finding itself in the position of the US government boycotting them.

And if they die you can always build more killbots.

What browser are you using? Looks great in Konqueror. In fact it's my favorite layout to date (also the least buggy other than the crappy "open a new page to see nested comments" style).

Historical fiction is still fiction. If I write a book about superman saving the world from a comet, I don't get to later call it non-fiction just because I included superman dealing with current events.

Brought to you by KT the Wonder Llama.