One of my RPG group brought his fiance to our game last week. She kept trying to put forward that his character should be renamed "Hector the Well-Endowed", and should get a very large snake familiar.

In Australia, we have mandatory voting. It only contributes to inertia.

Reason being, is people who are not interested in politics will take the minimal effort required to discharge their obligation - which generally means voting for a major party, who've had enough money to finance yapping at them from the television for the month prior.

If you want to adopt an electoral change that would empower third parties, go for preferential voting.

Not for as long as the taxi industry can bribe the government to keep protecting their niche for them.

I know, right. Next they'll want to prosecute me for all the jay-walkers I've been mowing down.

It's not really about what you or I would think or do - it's what people in aggregate do. If there's an artificial limitation in the legitimate supply of goods, people will find illegitimate ways to acquire them.

Think alcohol during prohibition. Marijuana (in most places) now. Western goods in communist Russia. And yeah, media where rights holder's are playing silly buggers. To appropriate a quote from your reference's prequel, "life finds a way".

If you're trying to manipulate people's behaviour by controlling what they are or are not allowed to buy, be prepared to fail.

Or, you know, pirate it. Which is generally the same response to the movie studies pulling their dick move. Artificially limiting supply creates a black market. I don't know if her move helped the book's position on the Times, but I guarantee it drastically increased the motivation to pirate.

She deliberately delayed the release of the electronic version, because she was trying to rig the Times Best Seller List (apparently, the Times only counted dead-tree book sales at the time, so she didn't release the e-book version to try and force fans to buy dead-tree, so the purchases would help propel it up the list)

I take it you haven't seen many of Charlie Heebdo's other cartoons.

Unless you're the government. Then you're allowed to kill people and steal their stuff at will. One rule for the ruled...

If there are a finite number of seats available in a CS program, and there is more demand than the number of seats, then yes, every person included means another is excluded.

Poor word choice in TFS. Chips don't make it harder to use stolen cards, they make it harder to use cloned cards.

Probably because this is a technology site, and not a fashion site. Fashion love change for change's sake - that's why they parade around on catwalks with ridiculously impractical things like dresses made of cutlery, and someone who wears a side of beef to an event is the centre of attention.

Technology isn't about change, it's about progress. Progress involves change, but just because it's change doesn't make it progress. Change for change's sake is inane. Tell us how the change makes things *better* and we'll be all for it.

Agree. This might come across as heresy, but I even dislike HHGTG as a book - it's really a series of loosely-connected jokes strung together by an absurdist plot. The funniest things in HHGTG are the asides and internal monologues - and that's pretty much impossible to reproduce in a movie (unless you do the whole thing in voice-overs, at which point it becomes less a movie and more, well, a radio play).

My favourite Douglas Adams book was Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency: funny, with a coherent (albeit, somewhat wild) plot.

Irrelevant. Your personal definition of adulthood has no bearing on whether or not children should be granted autonomy, nor how much. Nor does it have any bearing on outcomes. What really matters is what type of adults are produced by the two societies - one that treats people as children until their mid-twenties, and one that gives them personal responsibilities from a young age.

A decent return even after factoring in 20 years of inflation?