From the SUMMARY:

Why did this get modded funny? Am I seriously the only weeabee in a thread about Japan? Are you guys not aware of Hatsune Miku? The computer doesn't compose the music on its own but it's a publicly available application that allows you to synthesize voice. Some of the music they play at her concerts were composed by fans (who weren't paid to do so). Here's an example that would be disturbing even if it wasn't still crawling out of the uncanny valley: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTXO7KGHtjI

You're right, laws to protect citizens from "snake oil salesmen" were indeed important in the 19th century since no one could google "snake oil" and realize that this wasn't going to cure their cancer. Now you can. Welcome to the 21st century.

This just in! President Obama announces the immediate formation of a new free nation-wide wireless network simply called "Linksys".

http://www.thespacewriter.com/arp274_HST_XL.jpg

You're welcome.

I think we're all missing the underlying subtext here. There's a reason the IE team always sends its congratulations in the form of a cake... because it's a lie.

Yeah, most of us speak l337 nowadays. Comic very related: http://megatokyo.com/strip/9

If there's ever a robot uprising, I bet it's going to be started by us making them do stuff like this.

I agree completely. Frankly I think these idiots have done a lot to help the gay community. I remember back when they were picketing the funerals of dead soldiers, ranting about how they went to hell since they defended an allegedly gay-loving country. The best part was seeing marines going up to them and just glaring at them with pure hatred, clearly on the verge of beating the shit out of them. I have a lot of respect for our soldiers (regardless of what our leaders are telling them to do) and that just really struck me as a symbol of patriotism standing up against these people. It's because of stuff like that that no one takes them seriously. We all know they're total scum so we don't need to talk about it every time these people stage yet another silly protest.

In short, they've essentially made it fun and cool to hate people who hate gays. Keep up the good work Westboro!

OMG, so are you!

"...my office building mysteriously implodes."

*shifty eyes*

This exact sort of thing is already happening in the U.S. except rather than keeping people in prison to make them work, the prison lobby wants to keep people in prison for the sake of needing to build more prisons. We've got both the prisons' investors and prison guard unions constantly lobbying for harsher punishments for lesser offenses. It's a scary to think that it's profitable for anyone to lock people up and throw away the key...

Blizzard has got you covered: http://us.battle.net/matchmaking.html

Yeah, it looks like he's headed for -1 Troll any minute now.

I *love* this idea. Neural interfaces are still very much in their infancy with the best commercially available probably being the OCZ NIA and even it is mostly a glitchy gimmick at this point. But the standards they're considering for this X-Prize seem very high. Providing vision to the blind and being able to control virtual bodies both require an understanding of very intricate neural operations that we probably won't see for many years. Sure, there's been devices created that can sort of do these things already but not on levels that can significantly help the disabled. All the more reason that this prize is a good idea since it will hopefully draw interest to the appropriate fields of study. Unfortunately the kind of things that they're talking about will almost certainly require implants. Further advancement in non-implanted interfaces will undoubtedly be much slower so don't assume that you're going to be roaming the hills of Azeroth as if you were actually there any time in the next 20 years. But hey, hopefully I'm wrong.