The body is symmetrical, but in everything I've seen the thumbstick is only on the left side. It's racism, pure and simple; worse than 1000 holocausts. I should sue them under the ADA.

I'm was thinking of giving it a shot for music production software, except I can't find anything to indicate that there's a left-handed model. Anyone see a spec that I missed?

Ha! Favorite post of the day. In short, you're totally right.

What I love about this conversation is that I come across as so cynical, but I'm actually a hopeless optimist. I say anarchy is the ideal state of man and should be our long-term goal precisely because I do believe that if the safeguards are phased out, and people are forced to learn how to deal with each other as equals, then they might just rise to that challenge and, you know, keep the atrocities to a minimum. Sure I go through periods of cynicism, but in real life I'm remarkably happy, content, kind to others, generous, and free. And for me, the reason I'm free is because the only restrictions on my behavior are ones that I've chosen to accept. Anarchism isn't about chaos at all for me, it's the recognition that nobody can force you to do anything. They can impose consequences for your actions, but in the end the decisions are yours. I want TV and air conditioning and junk food, so I'm willing to pay taxes; if I decide that the benefits no longer outweigh the costs I'll stop. If you make that decision out of fear of punishment and pretend you have no choice in the matter then you'll be miserable, but if you make reasoned decisions about what to take from society, what you're willing to pay back, and where your own line of right-and-wrong lies, then you're completely free and life is pretty sweet.

Also if you call me emo again, I'm going to cut myself. That'll teach you. :)

I think my 2nd response to above to Alcoholist covers my thoughts on a lot of this too, so I'll let that stand, but there a couple points I suppose I ought to respond to here:
- Having it both ways. Well yes, obviously I'm screwed by taxes and social requirements as long as I choose not to drop out entirely, but 'sucking off the teat' seems a bit harsh, since there's no choice in the matter. Nobody pops out of the womb and thinks "no thanks guys, I recognize that your system sucks and I'd rather not be beholden to you", so by this stage of life we're all going to 'owe' something. I understand your point in a practical sense, because obviously I wouldn't be stuck here in an office cube posting to some forum if I wasn't taking advantage of the benefits (and yes, there certainly are benefits) that society has to offer. Does that mean I need to feel some sense of obligation to society for being so kind as to force those benefits on me? Hell no. Should the slave thank the master for the nice lodging? Nice try, but trying to make me feel guilty or appreciative isn't going to work. If a truly free society comes into being and I still opt to stay here, by all means bring on the guilt-trip, but until then I'm quite happy to take from you and give the absolute minimum back in return. Sucker.
- Doing anything useful with this information. I mean this as a serious, non-confrontational question, but what exactly have you /done/ with that information? Not to over-generalize, but I've never seen anything meaningful change, ever. Ever. To paraphrase Frank Herbert, democracy is like a bullfight, and we're the bull. The matador waves the red flag and we get all upset about this problem or that. Sometimes they let us nail a matador just to let us feel important and trick us into thinking we're in control, but more often than not we're tilting at windmills. We get incensed online and we talk and we bicker, but in the end the matador runs the show, and the people in power stay in power (left or right). I see a hell of a lot more rage out there than ever before, but less and less action. I would absolutely love to be wrong on this, and I would love to hear how NPR or the BBC showed you a problem that you went out and fixed, but if all you did is bring that information into an online circle-jerk like this, without any meaningful real-world change, then well...to me that's worse than useless. The only reason we still have freedom of speech online is because the man upstairs thinks (rightly so) that we'll piss away our rage on infighting and not a damn thing will change.

Again, I'd love to be wrong, but I think that them's the facts, brother. Hell, just look how quickly we all dig our teeth into each others' throats. In the real world, we all want the same thing: we want safety and happiness, and we want our fellow man to be happy and cared for as well. We just disagree on the means. I think that government is the absolute worst way to get to that goal. Fine, we can have that conversation and believe it or not, I'm a rational human being who just might end up agreeing with you. But instead it's insults and jibes and petty bullshit, and any momentum we might gather is pissed away. Not to say I'm not just as guilty of all that, but that's just because I've lost all faith in humanity. No big deal, really.

I think you missed the crux of my argument: I don't care what happens to the rest of you, people are idiots who get what they deserve, and I just want to be left alone. Unless you're hot and single, in which case I'll believe whatever you want me to believe.

Unless you're looking for a legitimate conversation about this? If so, I'm up for that.

Basically yes, I believe that anarchy should be the long term goal of any society. I think that government is a crutch that's there to protect us from our own animal nature, but over-reliance on that crutch has kept people from developing the ethical sense to deal with one another decently without needing a big brother to keep us in line. I don't need to be forced to treat people decently, I do it because it's the right thing to do, but I'll acknowledge that society still needs a little hand-holding. But people don't have any motivation to learn how to cope with one another as equals as long as there's this artificial outsider restraining their actions. We're like kids on the playground, wanting to fight while the teacher holds us back. There are times when you need that teacher to restrain you, but in the long-term you eventually have to learn how to deal with people without fighting; that lesson will inevitably be long, painful, and chaotic, but it's better than growing to adulthood any self-control or recognition that the person you violently disagree with has that right to be 'wrong'.

The root of every single problem out there is simple: people are assholes. And the current setup does absolutely nothing to address that root problem, because government and its institutions only address the symptoms. Need roads? Let's build them on taxes, and in 50 years we'll figure out how to deal with all the subsequent problems that those roads enable, rather than allow people to develop alternatives at their own pace (like: reducing the need for those roads by living and working in real living communities; building our communities based on mass- or alternate-transit). People lose money on the stock market? Regulate it, until it's so 'safe' that people become dependent on it for their retirement and the power structure of the country shifts into the hands of those who grew rich off of this artificially safe system; maybe if the stock market had been left as the wild west, we wouldn't be dealing with billionaires like Murdoch in the 1st place (I, for one, would in that case be far more likely to invest my money in a community-based company that I knew and trusted, rather than some faceless, immoral corporation).

Don't get me wrong, I don't propose throwing off all the safeguards that are in place to protect us from these kinds of corporatists. I certainly don't think that anarchy means you just turn off the lights and let people slaughter each other. I'm no corporatist myself, and I don't think you can look at someone like BP and say "this is the effect of a free market system". Everyone is quick to jump on corporate corruption as a demonstration of the flaws of capitalism, but the current state of affairs looks nothing like what a real free market system would have become. The bloated malevolent corporations that we deal with today are the result of government safeguards, not something that's managed to develop in spit of that regulation. Government intervention in general causes at least as many problems down the road as it fixes right now, not least of which is that as people become reliant on that protective mechanism, they stop asking "is this right or wrong" and only ask whether it's legal or illegal; how is it possible that our moral sense has evolved so little over the last 2000 years? Why are we at heart the same assholes we were when we lived in caves?

Anyways, that's my ideal. In the real world however, yes, I'm fine with the Somali ending where the world ends with a bang, because I think that people have proven over, and over, and over again that they simply don't deserve any better than what they have. I'm perfectly content sipping a drink on the patio while the world degenerates into chaos, because every day I meet someone stupider than the day before and think we're just that little bit more doomed anyways.

There's nothing so convincing as shouting "I'M RIGHT!", but a few points that I thought were interesting:
- So the answer to "Why should I have to pay for this?" is "Because I'm right!"? That's kind of a dick move. Don't get me wrong, I see some advantages to having a publicly-funded (but non-monopolistic) news source, but personally I'm just not interested in it anymore and don't want to foot the bill, regardless of whether or not it benefits the public; telling me that you think it's a good idea doesn't address the core ethical question of why you get demand my property for something I just don't want. At this stage in my life I frankly just don't care what happens anymore, don't believe what the news says anyways, and I just out of this system entirely. I recognize that that's not realistic, but arguments about the public good don't hold water with me. Clearly (to me) the public doesn't actually do anything useful with all the information they're given; we just happily bounce between outrages by the left and right, all while the same power structure gets further entrenched. So you haven't "completely and utterly debunked" any argument, you just reinforced that I don't want to have anything to do with the lot of you.
- Public roads. This is always a fun one, because I've guess I've gone from 'extreme' libertarian to anarchist over the last few years. I used to be one of those half-in/half-out libertarians who make infrastructure exceptions in all their arguments, but lately I've been rethinking that position. Sure, given the world we live in, stopping public road funding would be suicide. But the initial decision that it was government's job to build roads in the 1st place seems to have caused a lot of the very problems that pro-government factions bemoan today: automotive pollution, urban sprawl, monocultural class-divisions, etc. Hell, maybe if the tax dollars used for the Eisenhower interstate system had gone to private R&D I might have my flying car by now. - And finally, I'M RIGHT AND YOU'RE WRONG! MY LEGS HURT!

What are you referring to when you mention Wikileak's previous lack of good judgment?

Interesting. I've used ClamWin for years without problems, and just last weekend got my userinit.exe deleted. I hadn't even thought to blame ClamWin since it's so unobtrusive that I forget about it, and most of the forums I was checking were blaming AdAware; I don't use AdAware so I've been blaming Spybot instead. Guess I need to go check the ClamWin logs now.

I'm not totally sold on that being anything more than just marketing. Admittedly I tend to read in darker environments where backlighting is a must, but even in bright sunlight I've never had a problem with my LCD screen, and I have particularly terrible eyesight. I've only done limited comparisons of course, but the slower refresh rate of e-ink screens negates any advantage they might have for me. Out of curiosity I just browsed around a bit to try to find any real studies that have been done on user preference but didn't come across anything. Have there been any independent studies on this? Am I going to go blind, or am I just abnormal in my preference?

I think that dedicated ereaders will turn out to be a dead-end technology like mini-discs and that this is one of those "back in my day" moments: this generation (myself included) are still emotionally invested in traditional presentations of text, so ereaders that mimic books to some degree seem like the natural way to go; the same way my parents still prefer physical media for audio and video. Once the next generation grows up primarily with ebooks, the need for this in-between, pseudo-traditional technology will fade. I love books, but my library gathers dust now while I do all my reading on my (small screen) Blackberry. Plenty of people "can't understand how you can read on that tiny thing" but it's perfect for me: backlight means I can read in the dark without a lamp; adjustable text size and color; quick bookmarking and annotating; and smaller chunks of text mean that I actually read more, as I've started sneaking in a page or two during what used to be dead-time. Not perfect for everyone, but it's been enough to prove to me that there's nothing sacred in a 6"x8" sheet of text.

The big thing I'm waiting for now is an open, standard format that combines media-types. I would kill for an ebook/audiobook combo where I could bookmark what I'm reading, plug my phone into my stereo, and have the audiobook pick up at that bookmark for my drive home. Hell, why not video too? You read halfway through the battle of Helm's Deep, hear the rest on audio during your drive, and see the battle scene from the movie when you get home.

I'm always a little torn on regulation. I can see the virtue in trying to use it to fix a system that's heavily weighted towards corporate interests, but it seems like the law of unintended consequences inevitably causes it to backfire. For instance, I wonder what the real effect of regulating the stock market has been. By making it safer for investors than a total free market, did it artificially create an environment where bloated corporations thrive? It seems to me like people would have been a lot more prone to invest in local, known companies, and that stock prices would be a lot more realistically tied to income and profit if we didn't try to shield people from the inherent danger market investment. Generally I'm a free market guy and would oppose regulation, but I also don't think the current system is the product of a free market; how far can you go to correct an imbalance before you choke out innovation with over regulation?

Fair enough. Although I should say that I don't actually believe the Democrats are any better or worse. I think both parties are identical in every meaningful way, and our system is a shell game designed to manipulate people's anger so that the real aristocracy stays entrenched while any potential public power is dissipated on the wrong targets. It's a pressure vent to keep people from fighting back. So comments like the 'Republicanism' one tick me off: it's obvious that there's some righteous anger there, but it's wasted when you marginalize half of the audience. It doesn't matter who's in power, they're all pricks.

Well you've convinced me. How could I have misunderstood how balanced that post was? Like if I were to say "Democrats are communist monsters bent on eating your children. And Republicans have some problems too." Totally balanced.

I'm no censorship expert but I wouldn't consider the PRMC to be a 'pale shadow' of anything. Their kind of forced labeling enables policies like Wal-Mart censorship, which I think is just as destructive as any legallly-enforced censorship; it certainly hurts artists more.

Besides which, when did "less evil" become synonymous with "not evil"? It should be obvious that I'm no Republican sympathizer, and the zeal with which people jump to their party's defense is depressing and surprising. If the Democrats are marginally less inclined to asshole-ish behaviour, does that really make them any better? Hell, you could argue that they ought to know better. At least the Republicans seem to be upfront about being pricks.

Oh, and if your 1st line was a joke I give you all the credit in the world, but recommending that someone be modded 'troll' to limit their visibility in a conversation about puritanical censorship seems....pretty stupid.

'Republicanism'? Ever heard of Tipper Gore?

We have 2 identical parties whose existence is based on fooling the public into thinking they differ in any meaningful way. Swallowing the partisan lie is the surest way to make sure nothing ever improves.