"He is believed to be the sole author of the Windows Vista operating system."

He'll be remembered as one of the most malevolent and self-interested sacks of human waste ever to walk the Earth. A man whose excesses knew no maximum height and who's cruelty knew no lowest depth. He was foul, despicable and disgusting... but I don't think even he was that evil.

Yeah that sounds pretty dumb. But also weird: They're talking about lush gardens and foliage on a building that was inspired by something that existed on a dessert planet with no vegetation... Are they going for aesthetics, or is this the harbinger of a drastic ret-conning of Tatooine's landscape for the next media release? With Lucas, you can never be sure.

A friend of mine in med school wanted to help out with the building/early staffing of a hospital in Ethiopia, but she wasn't selected for the program (so she went to Cambodia instead to do other humanitarian work). I know nothing whatsoever about the details, but I have to imagine any hospital built today, anywhere in the world, would have some sort of technical infrastructure. A network with WiFi or perhaps even some sort of program that manages and sorts patient data... all these sound within the skill set of the average geek and could make a major positive impact. Apologies for the lack of solid information and here-say nature of the post. Regardless of what you do, I wish you the best of luck and I hope you find a project where your talents are put to good use for the benefit many, many people.

I was hoping to get my friends together at 5:30 for an End Of The World party... but they're all busy early, so we're have a Post Apocalypse Party at 6:30. What a difference an hour makes.

You can read the story from the perspecive of Mordor if you like, but I'm still waiting for a version of the original LOTR that removes the offensive word "hobbit" and replaces it with the more politically correct, "large-footed halfling".

"He probably would have killed off at least 1 of those people if he had a second season."
And when he got a movie, he killed off two.

You are correct about the useless nature of "treat levels" which this system provided, however you missed the point of why it existed in the first place. It was brought about because the government needed to look like it was doing something, and in America that's just as important as actually doing something. Specific information would be far more useful, but it takes time and effort to collect, connect and distribute. If a threat is centralized in one place and that place gets a proper, specific warning, people everywhere else are going to say "Why didn't I get anything?" even if there's zero chance they were at risk. Additionally, there isn't always reliable or detailed intelligence with which to make good warnings. When there isn't, the government can't just say "Yeah, we have no intel today." because they'd look lazy and incompetent. Enter the Color Coded Terror Alerts, the government can please everyone by making something that sounds like a warning, but without the burden of correlating data, or the risk of revealing there is none.

There's a nice little add-on program for Photoshop called Exposure that will emulate all sorts of film stocks. Kodachrome, Portia, Velvia, Tri-X... hell, it'll even emulate Daugarrotype. Granted it's far from the real thing, but it does preserve the color palettes that give these film stocks their various personalities.

"The Gettysburg Address"

Four score and seven frags ago...

"None of these people are proven to be pirates. Uwe Boll claims they are."

Uwe Boll also claims to be a film-maker, so I think it's clear we should take anything he says with a grain of salt.

The library makes things freely available with no limits on re-rental. Is there really much of a difference between me renting and ripping vs. me renting the same thing over and over? At least in the former scenario, I'm not denying other library patrons the ability to rent something.

Grandparent pays taxes. Taxes support the library. Library buys books, movies and music to make them freely available to the community. If the RIAA/MPAA don't want their products freely available like that, they should stop selling to libraries and/or sue them for lost sales.

The bad guys didn't win. The fact is, they can't. Every major DRM scheme has been cracked so far, and it's more than likely that anyone in the future will be as well. But I digress...

I use the term "pirate" to describe myself, as do most of my friends who download movies, music and software (I use methods other than downloading, but that's splitting hairs). I don't mind being called a pirate, and I have no qualms calling anyone who does similar the same. But consider this: We all know what the worst word a white can say to a black guy is. However, plenty of black people use the epithet casually with eachother. The context is different, of course, but the use of the word is in and of itself a strike back at the racism that bore it in the first place. It is a re-definition of the word on the terms of the people to whom it was applied rather than the people who applied it.

To compare the struggle for civil rights and the fight against racism to this war of words between corporations defending an antiquated business model and the people who are getting content for free would be downright farsical. But I think that a sense still exists in all people to take certain words used against them, redefine them, and then self-apply them as a sort of "Fuck you!" to the other side.

You can, Lifehacker just posted this article about doing that today:

http://lifehacker.com/5542041/block-sites-from-using-your-facebook-login-with-adblock-plus

"Do you really think someone else would have come up with a better screen play from the same source material?"

Yes, but the finished product would have looked nothing like the source. It would have required cutting parts out, adding new material in and seriously revising whatever remained. The human race fighting to overcome alien oppressors is not the worst movie concept I've ever heard. In the right hands it could be a pretty good movie, or at least something better than it ended up being.

It was pretty clear from the article that the CoS insisted that he write it their way. They didn't give him much leeway to adapt it into something that didn't suck so hard I took the DVD outside and curb-stomped till it shattered after watching it for Bad Movie Night.