I'm not too worried about this. The internet is designed to route around damage. If any oppressive organization were to try to control it, a shadow internet would instantly spring up and be beyond their control. And I'd immediately sign onto that and leave the censored one behind. I'm not talking different sites, but different protocols, routes, P2P DNS, etc. - whatever it takes. I bet it be up within days.

This is why we should just replace the internet with a big swimming pool that we can all enjoy. The most you'd possibly lose is your bathing suit, and that's generally fun for everybody.

Pedobear appeared at Dragon Con in Atlanta a few weeks ago, too. It was a different costume than the one shown. He had a "free hugs" sign and when a grown-up would hug him, he'd flip the sign over to say "too old". Here's a picture, about 1/3 of the way down: http://www.epbot.com/2010/09/dragoncon-costume-gallery-3.html

This is a long-needed attempt to control the incessant immature infantile troll-fest that is the WoW forums. One can't ask a simple question on there without a chorus of howling idiots attacking you and each other. I long since saw the futility of looking for help there. It's literally one of the worst corners of the internet. If you want to lose all faith in humanity - spend some time there. Honestly.

This will help. It's a low-attention way to try to shame people into behaving better. It's not the best solution, but it takes the least effort and expense on Blizzard's part, and I understand why they'd do this rather than hire a hundred people to police the forums and then hire a hundred counselors to prevent those first hundred from plunging forks into their eyes or throwing themselves off of cliffs at the end of each work day.

Great post.

The light-switch trick is a great test, as the ambient lighting in any given dream is a reflection of the location in the dream world (AKA state of mind) you are in, and can't be changed by flicking a switch.

I wanted to mention that there are also degrees of lucidity. It's a full spectrum, from acting out of sheer habit, completely unaware that you are dreaming, to acting as you usually do in the dream world to being aware that it is a dream, aware of your waking self, and controlling everything - including waking yourself up at the end to write it all down.

And lucidity can come and go as well - you can become lucid for a couple minutes and then lose it by becoming distracted by something. Distraction is the enemy of lucidity. My dream self knows this. I was once lucid and someone else in my dream was trying to show me a picture in a magazine. I resisted looking at it, because I knew I'd become interested in the picture and go into it (what I call a gateway) - at which point I would lose my lucidity. My dream self knew all that, and only upon waking myself up and remembering it did my waking self come to know it.

As a long-time lucid dream seeker and gamer, I've found that playing games before bed often results in what I consider "stupid" dreams of gaming. The context of the dream is the game, and you're running around playing it. It's a mix between waking physical reality and the game reality. There's usually not a lot of value to these dreams, I've found.

On the other hand, my dream self has become quite aware of himself as an personality in the dream world, with a continuing story from night to night, and has an understanding of the laws of the dream world and how to attain and maintain lucidity. I wonder if my love of games contributes to my ability to project myself into a new dream world or context or if it's the converse - my ability to project myself into the world of dreams contributes to my ability to enjoy video games.

There's no doubt dreams influence video games. The creator of Mario is a dreamer of some degree of lucidity. My first experiences flying in dreams came from taking progressively larger leaps into the air that led to flight. Fastforward a couple decades and Mario is doing the same thing in Super Mario 64.

There's an app for that. It's called Beejive. Last I checked it was $10, and if you and someone else had it, you could text each other as much as you want for free. When a text message comes in, an alert pops up on the phone and there's a sound or buzz. Then you jump into a IM chat screen and chat like that. I think I read that you can send text messages to phone numbers of people who don't have Beejive, but I'm not quite sure how that works.

That said, it leaves a LOT to be desired. You need to be logged into a chat network such as Jabber, and you get automatically logged out every few days. It's also horribly slow on the iPhone 3g, oversensitive to flipping, jumps to the middle of an ongoing chat when it flips, and has been somewhat buggy in the past. But my wife and I text on it daily for free, while her SMS bill for texting with her sister is $30/month.

I couldn't agree more.

Seven years ago I began a slow decline in health that completely ruined my quality of life. I suffered endless migraines, fatigue, abdominal pain, weakness, difficulty focusing, depression, loss of feeling, and social withdrawal. I went to doctor after doctor, and each gave me approximately 5 minutes of their time and couldn't figure out what it was. Very little came up in the standard blood tests.

I had several doctors accuse me of making it up, or saying it's all in my head. Most of the rest just shrugged and sent me on my way. If I had complete trust in medicine I'd have given up and had to live with this forever.

But that's not the kind of person I am. When I felt well enough to, I researched online - examining symptoms, reading up on scholarly articles from PubMed, reading patient cases, bulletin boards. I investigated everything. And 80% of the progress I've made on my condition over the years has been due to my research. I found doctors sorely uninformed on research done in the last ten years - as if after graduating they stopped picking up anything new.

Sure there are hypochondriacs out there. But modern medicine leaves a LOT to be desired, and I'm glad as hell that I have a resource like the internet that allows me to give my condition the attention it deserves.

I agree, and Final Fantasy XIII is a good example. Square Enix always does something unique with each game in this franchise, and the fighting system takes some getting used to. This specific game feels like it's in tutorial mode for the first 12 hours or so, and I've had the manual out the entire time, looking for information, getting tips, figuring out how everything works.

I recently bought Torchlight from Steam and if there was a manual I could access, I didn't see it anywhere. So I looked it up on Google and found the full manual in PDF format on http://www.scribd.com/. I'm not sure if that's authorized or not, but something like that works just fine since it's a PC game, because I'm at the PC playing it. If it were a console game, this would really only be convenient if I had an iPad or laptop nearby, so I wouldn't have to run back and forth from TV to computer to look things up.

There is a certain art and value to well-produced game manuals that I would miss.

Has anyone noticed how industries have taken "green" to mean "give you less for the same price?"

I just noticed the "correlationisnotcausation" tag. Is that just a knee-jerk reaction to studies now?

Are we suggesting that an increase in immune system activity CAUSED people to view a slide show about sick people?

I agree wholeheartedly. While this is somewhat off-topic, I find that multiplayer can not only fail to add something to a game, but straight-up ruin it. I recently quit WoW because I was so tired of selfish and rude players leaving groups when they don't get their drop, trying to control every aspect of another player's play style, putting you down for your gear, and being generally immature and abusive. While in WoW there is the /ignore feature, it's only character-to-character, not player-to-player, so if I and this asshat each have 10 characters, I can run into him 100 times before I've got every combination of /ignore worked out.

Right now I'm playing a single-player game - Eternal Sonata - and loving it. I haven't ended a single play session pissed off. It's quite nice.

More on-topic, I got Dragon Age Origins, and it's unplayable on my top-end gaming PC from just a few years ago. I ordered more RAM but I might need a whole new computer to play it well. If I need to replace my computer every 3 years or so, it's a lot more expensive than getting the latest gaming console. That means every few years there's a frustrating period of games outreaching my computer specs and being painfully slow. An experience you don't get on consoles.

This kill switch would be the HOLY GRAIL to hackers. For foreign countries waging cyber attacks, all attention would turn to gaining access to this system, because triggering it would be the very first step in any kind of attack. But this is also a shiny prize for any would-be script kiddie out there as well. Imagine the reputation you'd get for shutting down the internet.

My mom is into homeopathy. I've had health issues for a while, and she decided to step in and send me something her homeopathic doctor recommended for my symptoms. Always wanting to know what I'm putting into my body, I did some investigation first. Turns out the active ingredient was ARSENIC. I kid you not! I called her up to see why she was trying to kill me and she said such a small amount wouldn't hurt me. Whether or not it was too small to hurt me, it was definitely not going to help me!

Buyer beware! There is some crazy stuff in homeopathic remedies!

I love the name "Operation Titstorm" and I love the audacity of flooding the government's inboxes with the very images they're trying to censor. But is it an effective force for change? I'm happy to see them bringing more attention to the issue - they are definitely accomplishing that. But no doubt they are further polarizing these people against "bad people on the internet". The main problem is that it's almost impossible for "the people" to have a rational conversation with "the government". There is very little chance your emails or petitions will be read or cared about. Once politicians are elected, their accountability to their constituency pretty much ends and they can do as they wish. Something like THIS will get their attention, just as a huge protest in the streets of Washington would.