I don't know about that. Does anybody do pay-per-view ads anymore? I was under the impression it was mostly pay-per-click. Honestly, I can't remember the last time I clicked an ad, and if I did it was entirely an accident. Unless you're going to go so far as to argue that readers are obligated to click ads on sites they surf to generate money for the site, there isn't a whole lot of functional difference between browsing with ads blocked and ads visible for users who don't click.

Functional difference for the site, that is. From the user perspective there's potentially a big difference, in terms of bandwidth, clutter, and possibly security.

Thank you, anonymous coward. The most pithy thing I've seen from an AC today.

I didn't realize this had come out yet. Frankly, I don't care about graphics (or at least, as long as they're not worse than DA1, which I'm sure they're not). I'm also already wedded to my game-playing system of choice, and one game's output isn't going to change that one whit.

What I'm interested in is the game itself, and I haven't seen any headlines for that. Did I just miss the article for the release of a sequel to an AAA game, or did we skip that and go right to the graphics analysis? How is the game? Is it more like the first one, which I loved, or is it more like the second one, which I avoided because of all the crazy changes they made to it. Basically, am I gonna want to buy it?

Proposal for a slashdot poll: does anyone really actually care about the graphics on a game? Especially at the level we're talking about here? If the answer is more than 10% I'd be shocked, and if it's closer to 3%, I wouldn't be surprised at all.

Asimov died something like 30 years after 1965. His works are nowhere near public domain yet.

I'm just about to turn 40, and I can't say physically I feel that off yet. No way would I say I'm better than 20, but I'm not that much worse.

Now mentally, that's a whole different ballgame. Other than the fact I felt a little smarter back then and I feel less smart now, nearly every other single thing is better mentally. There's emotional stability, the comfort of years of experience, a much broader view, and I know how to get things done. There's a little distraction/forgetfulness, but I'm blaming two toddlers for that, and don't think it's got anything to do with mental decline setting in.

That's at 40. I'm not especially worried about 50, but I am concerned about 60. Actually, I think I would have said the same thing at 20 - even then I wasn't so worried about anything around 40, only later.

For the record, I'd be all over anti-aging technology, but currently I don't see much that's actually going to be applicable to me as I age. I hope it develops, but I suspect it might be a few generations (at least) before that stuff makes it big.

I've tried occasionally, with only rare luck. The thing is, between the often iffy late fall weather and the cold, this isn't my favorite shower to try to watch, anyway. I've had better luck camping out in the open air on a non-shower night when it was comfortable, and just watching the sky for a while. Maybe my impressions are skewed by anecdotal evidence, but it often seems like meteor watching is more a function of time and comfort than catching the peak of a recognized shower.

I would also like to thank the scientists involved for, just once, admitting that a show probably won't be that exciting. I'm pretty sure this is one of the first articles I've ever seen that didn't use hype or "could be one of the best ever" lines.

Likewise. When the internet got big enough in the 90's I quickly realized how *nice* it might be to put that kind of book into HTML format. The back button would make reversing so much easier, cut out the need for multiple fingers in multiple pages, and save you the trouble of starting over if you got too far in. I started a story once, but didn't have the persistence to finish it, sadly.

Tom Robbins' "Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas" also fits this bill.

And while not literature, I spent five years doing the writing for a text-based RPG that was all in the second person. It's not uncommon in the game world at all. It actually got so natural I had trouble switching to the third person when I tried writing a novel.

If you're still in search of such a thing, and don't mind fantasy rather than science fiction, Gael Baudino's Water! trilogy has richly complex text that is alternately a reference to or even mirror/parody of the styles of some of the greats: Joyce, Faulkner, and a whole bunch of others I can't remember at the moment. Highly literary, though also quite funny.

If you successfully hid this post from yourself, I have to ask, how is it you're here now telling others how to also hide it?

Counter-intuitively, the phrase comes from an analysis of lunch counters i the 50's.

While I mostly agree with you, there may be some honesty in that answer - they don't precisely know what rates will be in a year and don't want to quote you something that you can hold against them if rates change. Still, they ought to be able to tell you what the non-introductory rate is currently.

  Then there's also the fact that after the first year if you call and threaten to quit most companies will make some minor fiddly adjustment to your plan and give you the introductory rate a second or third year. My crazy company managed this by *adding* more channels to my package while keeping the introductory rate two years in a row. After three years they said I was out of luck, at which point I had to choose between switching, cutting the cord, or paying the full rate for a while. If you're prepared to play the game, it may not ever matter what the standard rate is because you'll never pay it anyway.

No, you're talking apples and oranges here. The $100 is for services, which aren't really very valuable. The 5 cents was for *copyright infringement* which we all know is worse than murder. I'm surprised they haven't bumped that up to the death penalty yet, to make the punishment fit the crime.

You don't think spammers can learn to strip out the characters between the + and the @ ? If I was a spammer, I'd do that automatically. Hell, I'd probably keep the original, but also create the stripped version, and then spam them both.

There's also the "put things away when you're done" and "leave things the way you found it" and principles, both of which call for a closed lid.

Plus the "it's completely disgusting that my pets drink out of the toilet so please close the lid before they not only get sick but track toilet water everywhere" variant that doesn't apply to everyone, but is critical when it does apply.