What? Are you using a potato for RAM or something?

Ah, no. Like is ubiquitous in the speech I am trying to describe. I'll try to give you an example.

"So, like, we went to this totally like random dive bar on Main Street? And like, I was all like, isn't this where Sasha and Greg hooked up? And like right at that exact moment there's this guy in the corner like all staring at us, and I was like, 'hey, what's your problem?' and he just like, I don't know, kept like ... STARING at us like he was like gonna maul us or something. Whatever."

I think that's a pretty reasonable representation of what passes for social conversation around here. And even though the topic is sorority girl speak, everyone does it. It's infectious. I often find myself saying "no, we didn't like look at the motherboard, we looked at the motherboard."

I ... I guess. Ya got me. Buckeye.

I seriously think you are missing the joke. I know it doesn't work that way.

What I am saying is that in search of a filler, they choose a word that accurate reflects their world view.

It's a cynical approach, but it's better than the alternative (the alternative being that people who attend the largest public school in my state and one of the highest-regarded engineering programs in the country cannot express themselves coherently).

>You don't really hear that much anymore.

You obviously do not live in a predominately college town. Here in Blacksburg we have a permanent population of around 15,000 and a student population of 35,000. For nine months out of the year, I marvel at how Frank Zappa has pulled off the longest troll in the history of music -- spreading that god-awful dialect all the way out East so that even 30 years after the song, I'm surrounded by what started as an attempt of a daughter to cozy up to her dad by making fun of stupid people from Encino.

If the girls talk like airheads, then the guys here talk like wanna-be thugs. Even at an engineering school, I am subjected daily to "Yeah, but uh, y'know I was like... whaaaaaaat?" But that's a whole other topic. First, let's get rid of the word "like". I am convinced that this generation is so disaffected and removed from everything that nothing is real to them anymore. They don't want a cup of coffee; they ask "can I just get like, a cup of coffee?" They didn't go see the movie 3 times, they saw it "like, 3 times". Nothing is real or concrete to them.

Bullshit meter... in the red.

I don't know what the fuck you just said little kid, but it touched me deeply.

I could have sworn GB was short for gigabyte. When did that stop? Why didn't I get the memo? Or is it a jigabyte?

Swing and a miss.
You reached too far.

Not really law, but convention. .xxx is a Sponsored TLD, which means there is a consortium of sorts who will approve or deny applications for the domain name. There are rules and regulations for the registrants of the domain, and I suspect that part of those rules would be a registration fee of some sort -- a token one at a company level, but painful for an individual, say $2500 or so -- in addition to the normal domain registration fee of $10 or whatever it is. I also imagine that while there most likely will be an ibm.xxx, it will be a redirect to ibm.com.

One of the reasons that this has taken so long to be placed into action is how inefficient a system this will become. No one is required to register a particular tld. There are more rules keeping registrants out of tlds or forcing them to give up their current tld than there are forcing registrants to adopt a particular tld. Tlds were never meant to be implemented as a way to filter content.

Also, currently successful sexually themed sites are very unlikely to forego brand recognition. Why should mostviewedsite.com switch to mostviewedsite.xxx when the .com is the recognized brand name? Yes, they'd probably buy their .xxx counterpart, only to have it redirect to .com. In a very real sense, this new tld will likely double the number of adult-content sites, but not necessarily double the content. However, groups opposed to this sort of content will now be able to cry louder than ever that the internet is "full of filth."

It seems to me that the only winners in this are the registrars and the certifying authority. I doubt little else will change.

Really? Because, you know, multiple other sources say that Zuckerberg started the prototype in September of 2003, and what we know as Facebook was launched in February of 2004.

If I recall rightIy, my vt.edu email address allowed me to register sometime in late 2004 or early 2005. On campus, it was starting to generate a lot of buzz as a great tool to bring lots of people together on short notice.

Your response is typical of what I was talking about though -- memory is a strange and elastic thing. You've been on Facebook for so long it feels like it's been 8 years, but it hasn't, and it really couldn't possibly have been.

Well, to play devil's advocate (to AC, sigh):

He could have been on Facebook in 2004, provided (as you mention) that he was in an Ivy League school. I am fairly certain that by the end of 2004, he could have had a Facebook with just a .edu address. However, the quote you reference doesn't explicitly say that he met his first wife on Facebook, it just says they met in 2003 and they met online. Heck: that could have been on AC2 or EQ or a MUD or etc etc.

Then again, people could have their dates all screwed up. The word "reportedly" plays strong in the sentence you quote. How many people have you met in, for example, December of 2007 that if asked you'd say you've known for at least four years? Similarly "not long after" is rather ambiguous. Depending on what your perception is of "a long time" that could be a few days, months, or even right at or a little over a year.

Control scheme change is even more apparent in the GTA3 series. GTA3 itself was obviously made for the PC first and then for console; the control scheme is pretty evenly matched whichever platform you choose. But then when you get into VC, everything on the PC side is ok until you hit the first mission for Avery Carrington (flying the toy helicopter) rather early in the game. Missing that right analog stick to control your clockwise/counterclockwise motion makes that mission incredibly difficult to pull off on a PC, and despite many frustrating hours of effort I could not satisfactorily configure a Xbox 360 controller for the PC to replicate the console controls. Lastly, when you get to SA you are practically stopped at the first Cesar mission (where you have to compete in the hydraulic car hop) because the numkeys don't map like the right analog stick does. Similarly, riding a motorcycle in VC or SA loses some finesse because you can't lean forward or back like you can via the left analog stick using just the keyboard. Considering these games span from ~2001 through to ~2004 I'd say it was a rather rapid sea change.

For those of you who have found otherwise, please let me know where you got your controller bindings (preferably for the 360 controller), because my laptop can outperform the heck out of my 360 visually.

I came to say this, too. I love the scrobbling end of things.
Discovery has been so-so, but definite big winners when it got it dead on.

My stuff