The super bowl ads this year were horrible. I remember like 2 years ago the Super Bowl ads were these insane ads in which were hilarious and had great actors in them. This year they weren't much better than normal ads.

The Google ad however really stood out. Heck it even made me feel emotional.

I welcome our new Google overlords!

His family should be honored that a company as big as google decided to make a reference to one of their father/grandfather's books in the name of their flagship product. I mean this is ridiculous that the copyright machine representing the family would be trying to do this.

So what, now every time someone makes references to a character in a novel they can be sued.

Thirty Seconds to Mars has a song called Stranger In a Strange Land and I haven't seen the Heinlein foundation get upset over them using a trademarked (its the book's actual title) phrase.

Cmon, what these Sci-Fi writers really wanted was to make a lasting impression on the world and the foundations representing their estates should be more interested in that rather than just trying to make money on every little reference made.

I'm all for security but now this all nonsensical. Instead of actually making actual changes they just impose extremely annoying rules that have no actual security improvement. What does it matter whether or not it is the last hour...can't the terrorist just set off a bomb...I dunno before the last hour. I don't understand what the actual point of this rule is.

So if I want to pee, read a book, put something away, or so much as even flinch I'm gonna be threatened with an arrest. Simply inconveniencing people isn't gonna make security any better...

Backup your laptop before traveling overseas...you never know if customs might shoot it.

Youtube is most certainly an ISP. An ISP is any company that hosts content without having any sort of publishing arm or creating content themselves.

As much as I absolutely love Stranger in a Strange land I think I would go on a murderous rampage if some hollywood director made a crappy movie about it.

cmon how could you think "but in future countries" sounds okay.

it should be "but in the future countries"

great info though. I mean its nice to see that the internet is starting to become more international, especially as the US cuts mandatory ties to ICANN.

I completely agree with this article. We have a local free newspaper here in South Florida called the New Times that is incredibly popular. It usually has local news about corruption and hotspots in South Florida. In addition it has an occasional national article (it just had an article talking about how the government is doing nothing to the big wigs involved with the banking collapse) and it has some interesting movie reviews. Overall it has actually become more popular in South Florida and has gained more prominence and readership. Pretty much every single business has a New Times drop box in their waiting room and the community college I go to probably has more than 10 drop boxes which are always empty about a day after the papers are dropped off.

I mean if local newspapers just focused on good exciting journalism they would get plenty of readers. I mean I read a ton of news on online and I haven't picked up a national newspaper in years, yet every monday I sit down and read the New Times while sipping on a cafe con leche and having some rice and beans at lunch at my favorite Latin restaurant.

I remember actually siting geocities pages as a source on my middle school papers. In heinsight that was probably a bad idea.

I remember using freewebs.com to make webpages when I was in middle school...or even worse the free webpage that earthlink gave us.

Wow I was so proud of my stupid earthlink webpage...with its site counter, guest book, and all that crazy stuff. I learned html from that kind of stuff and damn was I proud of my incredibly dumb web pages. I remember having midi auto playing music and a stupid cursor effect.

low UID master ...I come here to pay homage to you.

Its things like this that make me really wish the FCC would hurry up and ban permanent exclusivity deals.

But that would only happen in a world where congress can actually get anything done and stand up to businesses.

The nook does look pretty snazzy if you ask me. Amazon really needs to step up there game or the good ol' invisible hand will smack amazon in the face :P

Was amazon really too stupid to contact vodafone or orange and get a plan from them. I mean really why would they actually pay roaming charges with AT&T. Its not like they bought the kindles from AT&T and AT&T locked them :D

I mean this is the only reason I prefer playing PC FPSs. I love being able to go to the same server over and over again and knowing the regulars there. I am also part of a clan atm. There is something to said about dedicated servers and even though they cost a lot of money and activision running servers for us makes people have to spend more money but all in all the reason people are willing to fork over so much for a server is because it adds a new dimension of community.

It's hard to play matchmaking all day because there is no sense of community and its just one random game after another. There is nothing like going back to a dedicated server that you always go to and playing with a bunch of people you played before.

Eventually I ended up running a CS server off of the servers I used to sell shoutcast hosting (business got kinda slow meh) and damn was it fun. I had the zombie mod installed and I was running my own little clan.

How can activision stick such a massive middle finger to their customers. This is ridiculous.

Whats even more ridiculous is how the OP put up this slashdot post and even mentioned the petition without linking it.

http://www.petitiononline.com/dedis4mw/petition-sign.html

cmon guys sign that petition and vote with your wallets, if we allow them to do this then other games will see this as the go ahead to do the same.

In economics class they teach us stuff like opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is the cost of an activity measured in the amount of money you could be making if you did something else.

So for example if you in college the cost of going to college isn't just the tuition its also the 40 or 50k that you could have been making had you not gone to college and worked, so even if you get a scholarship your still technically losing money (although, of course, you make it up in increased wages later on).

So lets say he could have gotten a 60k job being a journalist (I don't actually know how much they make) and he spend 6 months full time writing this book. Therefore he would have to sell 15,000 books just to break even.

And btw in most parts of the business world a 5% margin is atrocious, that is considered absolutely paper thin. About the only people that come anywhere near that margin is a bulk store like costco. My family owns a sports nutrition store and have lower prices than everyone around us but we have had to start cutting out and negotiating with distributors for any products that have lower than a 45% margin. The thing is we have so many fixed costs like marketing, rent, labor, franchise fees, etc that we need high margins.