We should, but that's political suicide. Furthermore, once one Congress raises the tax on gas, the next Congress (which will inevitably be elected to replace that one after a wave of townhall meetings) will lower it.

You can still publish anonymously.

To liken this to Paine--while he did not sign his name to the original Rights of Man, presumably he gave it to someone, and that transaction wasn't anonymous. His efforts to distribute it at first would certainly have linked his identity to the work among the publisher or publishers he used. The book was sold, and the sellers were obviously not anonymous.

You want _more_ privacy than Paine had. You want the right to publish a comment without _anyone_ knowing who wrote it. That's not really what newspaper forums are for (which I think is just to generate page hits). If you have something to say anonymously, and want a lot of people to read it, you're going to have to work with someone who can get it out there and will hide your identity. That's really the only safe way to ever be sure regardless.

This is what Wikileaks was _supposed_ to be for (hence the Wiki), but I think it strayed a bit from that objective in recent years.

I won't defend that - they were certainly overzealous and careless in their handling of that domain. However, it appeared to be accidental, and in three days the websites were restored. Presumably the website owners have some legal case for any lost revenue.

This happens off-line, as well. Police make mistakes, innocents are harmed. Police are sometimes punished, and the state ends up paying out if the victim can engage in litigation. It's unfortunate, and often the side-effect of having a police force that is often given far too much leeway by a public that is too often too anxious about security.

To make any comparison between this and governments like Egypt, however, is dishonest. In Egypt, the intent, quite plainly, was censorship of political thought and speech. The freedns investigation was censorship of images the majority of Westerners agree should be illegal to produce and distribute that overstepped its bounds via either simple administrative error or a (bad) policy of "better safe than sorry." It was corrected fairly quickly.

I also question the numbers - sure, 84,000 sounds like a lot, but computers can make 84,000 different versions of the same thing in milliseconds. I've had some freedns domains in the past that I haven't used in years; I wouldn't know if there was this sort of disruption. Ultimately it sounds like a few businesses were temporarily disrupted as a result of a large police action. That's always happened in the physical world - which is unfortunate - and the Internet is not immune.

I don't think you can easily get phones dumber than that - unless you're willing to pay more. The "free" ones my wife and I got from T-Mobile recently have all those features. Does anyone actually use the calendar features on their dumb phones?

The only times I find myself really wishing I had a smart phone are when I'm waiting for something, like take-out; but then I play 30 seconds of Pac-Man (which came as a free demo on my phone) to see how high a score I can get before it times out, and repeat as necessary - and I feel like a big enough jerk standing next to a take-out counter doing that, I can only imagine how conspicuous I'd feel playing an actual game or reading email on a smart phone.

Note to self - bring book when I anticipate waiting. Problem solved. $70/mo. saved.

Unlike stuff we see and hear, you can't describe what we smell on a single dimension, and that's why we literally have hundreds or perhaps thousands of different olfactory receptors, while we have only three major types of light receptors on our retinas - and, correspondingly, three different color signals in most color display adapters.

While this machine promises 20 basic scents, I suspect, even if they were delivered well and integrated into a game seamlessly, you'd grow bored of them quickly.

I could see some limited uses - warning a player of a nearby danger, for example, which would work well with the limitations of olfaction - unless sounds or sights, our olfactory system adapts rather quickly to smells. A brief exposure to a certain aroma might be effective at the right point in the right game, but for such little reward this seems like a rather awkward solution. That said, aromas can be quite evocative, activating our limbic system in unique ways that could provide for an in-depth experience far richer that we've seen before - for example, the smell of incense in an abbey, for me, might be the difference between "yet another generic abbey" and "this feels real to me."

Is this why few things in video games have ever been more satisfying than using the grenade launcher in GoldenEye?

State of mind, for example.

I've tried researching this for some time on-line, and haven't found a clear answer.

I want:

1. Surround sound in game.
2. Surround sound over headphones.
3. Environmental effects.
4. Decent sound.

This should be what most gamers want, right? I can't be the only person out there wearing headphones, and when I got environmental effects to work on my old-gen M-Audio in Half-Life 2, they sounded awesome (unfortunately, the Sensaura drivers for that feature were bad and it didn't work most of the time).

I've heard new games can provide environmental noise effects without dedicated EAX - is that true?

Is surround over regular headphones effective? I don't see it advertised as a feature any more. Have companies just given up on it?

Well certainly no one would argue that doctors and courts shouldn't be the ultimate arbiter of which lives are "valuable."

It's kinda cute and I learned something. At least I think I did. Is that robot for real or what? Now I'm confused.

The problem with parodies (and this isn't really a parody - it's not mocking anything) is that it's hard to know what to take seriously.

Also, people give out free samples all the time to create a "buzz" about a product that will likely fly under the radar. I don't see anything new here.

Most pirated material is stuff people already know about and want. Do you think if Adobe started giving away Photoshop people would suddenly desire it more than they already do?

Wait, you guys are siding with a RECORD COMPANY over an ASTRONAUT?

And the record company is SONY?

Is this opposite day?

You kinda did this in Dragon Quest IV as Torneko, although the experience there was pretty dull.

A "gaming-grade" mouse and surface might have better sensitivity but I won't likely see a difference in browsing.