Racism is not the origin of that term. Calling a spade a spade, instead of an earth moving tool, is just pointing out that you are plain-speaking.

You mean, more deprecated tags?

Well, yeah. Except I stick the disc in to the machine, wander off to get a drink, or a snack, or take a piss, and when I get back the DVD is stuck on a language select screen, which is only there so that it can better serve me the copyright warning. So I still have to wait around to get to that screen, or come back and wait through the copyright messages. On a disc I've bought.

Then there are the discs that start playing the feature automatically after a short period of time, because, I dunno, they think some people are too stupid to work out how to start it running? So I stick the disc in the machine, go to get a drink, snack, or have a piss, and before I get back the film starts and I have to skip back to where I want to be.

No, on the level of frustration it's not particularly high, but it is a frustration. I only wander away from the machine because it has lots of unskippable crap. I have been conditioned to start a disc before I'm ready to watch it. This isn't right, and certainly not when I've been a good little consumer and paid for the product. I should be able to get myself ready, then start the disc, in much the same way that I do with a computer game, book, bath, car, washing machine, cooker, board game, any-other-thing. I have yet to find that I need to prime a toilet twenty seconds before I need to use it, just so that it flushes there and then and doesn't have me standing near my own filth waiting for it to be ready.

Um, BBC1 HD is just a mirror of BBC1, but in HD. Auntie couldn't have shown a BBC2 programme in HD except on BBC HD.

Been done.

Ditto to what Trepidity and Seumas said. But I have questions. The article has a quote: "If you’re not paying for it, then you’re the product being sold." So: I just installed OpenBSD on some hardware I had lying around. You see where this is going.

I didn't buy the CD set (yet). It's about an 80% chance that I will now, and 99% if I turn the box into a packet filter as planned.

Questions:
(1) In what way am I the product being sold (by OpenBSD)?
(2) If I'm not "the product", then how can I tell? I'm dissatisfied with any answer that says it's obvious on its face: "I just know in my gut that Google has the capacity for evil, yet OpenBSD is good."
(3) If I am "the product", then by what mechanism am I suddenly relieved of that status when I buy the CD sets?

I'm not trying to argue that OpenBSD is good therefore Google is good, nor that Google is bad therefore OpenBSD is bad. I genuinely can't reconcile my experience with the quote, so I think the quote is an overgeneralization. Both Google and OpenBSD may or may not be selling me as a product, the fact that they're free tells me very little, and I have to research them myself.

Then you get product placement like in I, Robot, where products are not just in the world but featured, talked about, shoved in your face in a blatant attempt to influence your purchases. Rather than being immersed in a real world, we are snapped back in to our own world full of obvious advertising.

I suppose product placement isn't bad in itself, it's how product placement is used that determines how it is perceived. Populating a world with items increases the verisimilitude of the circumstances, making it too obvious reminds us we are only the pawns of big corporations.

Lower prices on 2.0GHz chips. This will increase sales, but means giving up on the money of those people who really need (or think they need) the extra speed and are willing to pay for it.

Oh, boo-fucking-hoo. They have advanced their manufacturing process to give superior yields, and rather than offer these yields to more people they want to suck the market for as much money as possible by artificially restricting demand. Yes, they're a business and that's their job, but those are still weasel words apologising for a corporation who are stitching up the public.

this seminal event was corrupted by the presence of hardcore pornography

And yet you, oh 'member of the moral community', are fine with using the word 'seminal', which originates from 'semen'.

For shame!

Oxford English Dictionary entry for 'automagically'.

There's no content that I'm missing out on

Well, *of course* there is. You may not value that content, and that's fine.

It's a figure of speech, sir, and quite comprehensible given the context.

Can someone add a hyphen between the first two words, please? The headline is difficult to parse without it.

But what is 'anonymity' on the internet anyway? If someone is thousands of miles away in a different country and I am never likely to meet them, see them, or even bump in to them in a different on-line game, how does knowing their real name affect their idea of personal responsibility?

I fear the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory will still apply when real names are used, because most people will remain effectively anonymous.

I guess the 21/6 rationale is that some people call it "the twenty-first of June." Those people are wrong. It is "June twenty-first," or if you prefer, "June twenty-one." Do those people call the time "the thirty-seventh of three p.m."? I think not.

And do you call the full date 'two thousand and ten June twenty-one'? I think not.

Your 'one and only' correct date format makes sense for computers but not for people. I do not ASCII-sort dates in my head and I seem to prefer more specific information first before the more general.

I'll stick with 21st June 2010. You can do what you like.

Irregardless of your beliefs,

Uh-huh.

the phrase was used in a perfectly crommulent way.

Not really. 'Begging the question': we have answers on Language Log.