Why would I need to do any of this? Cast members are performing on stage in a public place, with no reasonable expectation of privacy whatsoever. Audience members are allowed to take all the photos they like as well. Should every audience member also be required to jump through these hoops before being allowed to post photos they took online somewhere?

I'm a long-term Rocky Horror Picture Show cast member, and I run a web site for our local cast in Austin. I've been running this web site for over a decade now.

Cast members are frequently very interested to see photographs of themselves performing in the show. And since it's Rocky Horror, they're usually wearing lingerie of some sort. At the time the photos are posted, they're invariably very excited about this. Especially because I take pride in my photography, and most people haven't seen photos of themselves prior to this that someone had actually put significant work into.

A few years later though, these same people have frequently quit the cast, possibly graduated from college, and moved on to other activities. They may decide they want to apply for jobs in education, as music minister of a church, etc. They do some vanity searching on Google and are shocked... shocked I tell you!... that the Rocky Horror cast web site is still online and kicking with what had been posted some years previously.

Now keep in mind this is a hobby web site that I do purely for the enjoyment of myself and other cast members. It's done in my spare time, and I've always paid for it out of pocket.

I'm sure I could honor requests to remove all of these photos, but I simply don't want to. It involves a lot of time and effort on my end, to accomplish something that's actively taking away from things I take pride in myself. I get probably a half dozen requests per year on average at this point all basically saying the same thing: "Take down my photos now! You're causing damage to my reputation!". At some point I just had to say to hell with them all and whip up a form letter response saying "Sorry, but I'm just not going to do anything about it".

With the board game you basically have to search for the Chinese and/or Korean name equivalents instead, which are "weiqi" and "baduk". Perhaps Google Asia can can come up with different names that people can actually search for also...:-)

Why the hell would adding draconian laws favorable only to certain industries be called "reforms"?

I'm a bit younger (34), but yes... I've never used cursive as an adult. In fact while I was still in high school I stopped competing in UIL spelling contests because of the requirement that all the words you spelled be written in cursive. If you printed the word (and spelled it correctly), it was still counted as wrong. I thought that was insane, so I stopped bothering with it.

If it weren't for the deal that J.R.R. made with Saul Zaentz way back when, we wouldn't have any of the Lord of the Rings movies in the first place. Nor the Lord of the Rings Online game (which I happen to play). Nor any number of other things that may have first turned people on to Tolkien, including the old pen and paper Middle Earth RPG system.

Christopher Tolkien has had control over the rights to things like The Silmarillion, and is notoriously limited in what he'll allow people to do in relation to it. I'd hate to think of what would happen (or more to the point, not happen) if he were able to somehow get back control over The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings also.

IE7 doesn't run on Windows 2000.