I too enjoyed the earlier seasons much more than the later ones (I've only caught the occasional episode from the current season). Back when they had a limited budget and had to be clever (and thrifty) in testing the myths it added something to the show.

It IS about race, you stupid fucking racist. Brown wasn't a thug, he had never been in trouble with the law and was enrolled in college to learn engineering.

The protests started peaceful, and only turned into rioting when the idiotic, racist Ferguson police acted like the racist morons they are.

People (and I use that word grudgingly) like you are the problem. I'm a white man who grew up in the St Louis area, and can tell you from experience that Missouri is indeed the most racist state in the union.

Most of the funding didn't go through (I'm guessing some jackass used a prepaid visa card and drained it before the funding period was over), so he actually only got like $76 or so.

I suspect most people funded the guy so they could poke fun at him in the comments, which I guess is one way of raising money.

Indeed.

Kickstarter recently(ish) stopped screening projects, so now there are even more completely ridiculous projects with no hope of producing anything viable.

Here's a really sad one from a guy who clearly has a mental disability: https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...

Any startup is risky for sure. To get money from traditional funding sources, you need to have all your ducks in a row, a well developed plan, and convince a lender (who is usually pretty damn good at risk assessment) that you've got a shot. Even then, success is only moderately likely.

Kickstarter doesn't even have the barrier of convincing some suit that you might be able to make money. You have to convince regular people, who don't have the same skepticism as say a bank, although I think this has been and will continue to develop over time in the "crowd funding community" as people see more failures and understand why they failed/what the red flags are.

That said, imo kickstarter is all about the long shot. It's about backing stuff that would probably be too risky or too niche for traditional funding. I've backed some projects. Some have succeeded, some have not, but in general I've gone into it knowing what it is (a gamble).

The police kicked down the door, breaking the glass and maneuvering through the room with guns drawn. The living room was empty. They searched the kitchen. Nothing. One of them kicked in the bedroom door and swung his assault rifle in a wide angle as he crashed through.

Immediately he saw that the floor was covered with spam. A computer's hard drive had exploded under pressure and was oozing a liquid discharge of strange attachments and cryptic URLs across the desk and onto the floor. " Couchsurfing sucks... here's a better couch!" they yelled, one after another. Then the fumes struck him.

Overwhelmed, he stumbled backward, spraying vomit across the living room as he fell. He lay on the spammy floor unconscious, convulsing, muttering the same thing over and over. "Delete... delete... delete... delete..." The other officers quickly ran out of the front door, dragging him along by the legs as they struggled to cover their eyes which were lachrymating upon exposure to the spam. One of the units outside called for backup and unwound a yellow tape labeled "POLICE LINE - DO NOT EMAIL" around the residence. A forensics van pulled up, and several officers strapped rubber gloves onto their hands and Pentagon-surplus armored spam filters on their faces. They reentered the building, treading lightly, taking flash photographs, and laboriously stuffing individual spam emails into each of 10,000,000 Ziploc bags.

About twenty minutes later, Detective Protagoniste and the Commissioner arrived at the scene in their unmarked car.

"Well, what do you make of this mess, Detective?" asked the Commissioner, as they approached the building. Protagoniste picked up one of the bags, and held it up to the light, and replied, "Commissioner, as of now, the spam's been caught... but not the Spammer!"

Ah, awesome.

What happened with Metro? Last I heard/saw it was still kicking (legit question, I don't really follow what's going on in Windows anymore).

Three anonymous racists trolls in one JE. Brown probably had a slashdot account, the kid was a nerd. He'd just graduated high school and was enrolled in college to study engineering. He'd never been in any trouble with the police, and those who knew him said he was a peaceful young man with a good sense of humor.

Now heartless racists, like the Ferguson police chief, are trying to demonize him.

This hits close to home for me, I have family and friends in the St Louis area and grew up in Cahokia. And yes, there are a lot of racists there. Idiots, if you ask me. The Ferguson government was the stupidest of all, they were begging for riots and still are.

Heat death is scheduled to happen a googol years from now. If the Big Rip hypothesis is true then the universe's life is already a half over. Then dark energy expansion will successively disintegrate galaxies, then solar systems, planets, humans, atoms, and protons in a cataclysmic disaster.

Amen to that.