For now. Speech is only free as in beer, where the beer is made from hops grown on Pandora.

While I have no doubt these machines are the bane of our personal freedom, and may even be dangerous its also possible that cancer clusters show up randomly. They do in areas near cellphone towers, unrelated to radiation, simply because clusters happen randomly too.

What a badly written sensationalist story. It's like something from the Daily Mail

Ubuntu is a brilliant system, and I paid nothing for it, and it works beautifully on my system, updating automatically and smoothly and compatible with all of my hardware. It even recognised both of my Midi controllers by name without any drivers.

I can imagine some people making a fuss over this tracking system, but I'm totally happy with it and if I wasn't it wouldn't be difficult to stop.

... to hope the kid hurries up and dies so we can bid for it on ebay? Am I right!?

Twitter is an excellent form of communication. Concise and only heard by people interested in the person communicating.

Unless you happen to be watching CNN or any other news organisation that seems to think we care what people on twitter think!

Seriously though, you're right in that it does everything its supposed to do, but what people expect from technology changes all the time, and twitter will probably get caught up in the corporate need to oversaturate it with ads or media, or the public's need for something, not necessarily better, but different. That's something all social networks fear the most - not necessarily being bad at what they do, but simply being out of fashion.

People left myspace in droves because it abused its popularit, profile flexibility and became saturated with horrible profiles and mass promotional material and dubious privacy policies. They went to facebook, which is just repeating some of myspace's mistakes and adding a few of their own. Now that I think of it, a lot of people hated facebook as soon as it stopped requiring you to have attended a college and opened up to anyone. It can never be that again, and for that reason, anything else that offers that right balance of exclusivity and popularity will take its place.

It seems that twitter's thing is simplicity, combined with the ability to stay up to date. I can think of a dozen apps that have offered that for years. It only takes twitter making one mistake too many for one of those existing ones or a new one to suddenly become popular, and so on.

The NYT isn't going anywhere. It may have to evolve to stay afloat, but it'll outlast Twitter for sure. Even if it didn't, it will be better archived for future generations than Twitter will ever be. Digital social media platforms barely last 5 years before their popularity starts to wane. They also have that signal to noise ratio that's a nightmare for any archive or researcher. They also certainly don't have any obligation for fact checking. Fake NYT news stories aside, at least you know a quote is probably a real quote, whether its taken out of context or not is another argument.

Anyone of note still swapping news stories on Friendster? ICQ? Even myspace? Hey remember keyboard cat? Chat roulette?

Twitter has some longevity and will be around for 10 years at least, but I'll give it 3 more until its replaced by a new, better, fad. Actually scratch better. Twitter is inferior to almost every communication medium out there. Lets say, simpler, and by luck, more popular.

I was walking by some laptop users the other day and heard an ICQ "Incoming message" alarm. Lik

Ok, troll.

argh, typos. Well you get the gist. It seems the that perceived quality of a movie tends to fluctuate with a persons perceived understanding at how society is judging them for it.

If society judges them to be bad\immoral\criminal, due to legal action or peer group judgement, then the perceived quality of the movie plummets. After all, how can you be bad if you've pirated a terrible movie. The crappy filmmakers should be punished for making it so bad in the first place.

Note, that this is entirely unrelated to actual quality, or actual judgement, but just on the perception of the individual making the rationalisation.

There seems to be a bit of post hoc rationalisation going on here regarding the quality of this movie

Now this is just my observation and as such anecdotal evidence, but, I noticed that ever since Hurt Locker was released it was praised by everybody I spoke to. I hang out a lot on both movie forums and filesharing forums, and that opinion was nearly universally shared well after it won a bunch of Oscars and the hype naturally faded. There's an argument to be made that the sucess of the movie, and word of mouth was greatly helped by filesharing, but I'm not making that argument here. Its almost certain that a huge amount of people who liked the movie and spread the word, pirated it. However, almost every opinion I read was that it was an excellent film, until news came out that people were getting sued.

So I look at the file sharing forums, and torrent news blogs, etc and as expected, near universal derision for the producers, but, strangely, suddenly an awful lot of people seem to think "Well it wasn't that good anyway".

What's interesting to me is not just that there are suddenly a lot more negative comments about it than I've seen before, but they're automatically linked to this news story, like its justification. Obviously, the quality of the movie has nothing to do with the rights holders to sue for copyright infringement, so its strange that

Does it feel like a rationalisation to anyone else or just me? Could it be a form of cognitive dissonance, specifically Postdecision dissonance? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Postdecision_dissonance

1. "This is a good movie." 2. "Uh oh, this filmmaker has done something abhorrent to my beliefs." 3. This guy is an asshole. 4. Well maybe it wasn't that good a movie

The movie is done, and hasn't changed since released, but if I was to look at the various forums around the internet right now, the universal feeling seems to be it wasn't that great a movie after. The idea that the quality of

He has a criminal record. His passport was old. They cancelled it. He got it back.

Sorry Steve. The PC had me at "Hello boys"

Thats.. three times now? Star Trek 2 Star Trek 6 Star Trek: Reboot?

No you're not. Whedon's work is predictable and dull IMHO.

For £11.99 a month I can see as many movies as I want. www.cineworld.co.uk If I see a movie a week, thats pretty cheap. Since I don't have a sugar addiction I can just bring a bottle of water with me rather than buying a soda, and the cinema chain I go to is doing good business Whats the problem? The movie industry have adjusted their prices for people like me who love movies but want a reasonable price. Seems like no matter how hard they try, there's just some cheapskates out there that will never be happy