As a Canadian, I am fucking disgusted and appalled at our recent No vote at the UN.

Bad enough it's a shitty decision, but worse yet, when lumped together with the other No voters, the list looks even more pathetic than "The Coalition Of The Willing" one did. I didn't even know that was possible.

I think my favourite thing about this whole Benghazi fake scandal is the apparent assumption by conservatives that the Diplomatic Corps should not be behaving in any kind of diplomatic fashion whatsoever.

On 9 October 2012, the game XCOM: Enemy launched... launched in the US. Unknown to me, the EU launch date was to several days layer, 12 October 2012. Maybe. Yet, 9 October 2012, I received an SMS from Gamemania.nl a dutch gaming retailer chain, that my copy was ready to be picked up. So I left work early that day to arrive 17:54 in front of the store. Doors pulled almost shut, store had already closed and refused to serve me. Very well, I thought there are other stores in the world, so I bought it the next day at Free Record Shop in Amsterdam. Then when I came home, I tried to install. First I had to install steam, which crashed, crashed and crashed some more but finally I got it working and had to create an account. Then activate my email. Then I installed the game and was told it was not released. What? If the game was not released, what was I holding in my hand? Note the error message mentioned nothing about a region or what would be the release date. Just not released. By google came to my aid and I found that throughout Europe, the game was available for sale but not yet ready for install. I read this from angry users posts. Not a single forum had an official answer yet. Not yet and counting. Even the official release date was less then clear. But I know my Internet, if Steam, Dutch retailing, 2kgames/firaxis couldn't/wouldn't help me, maybe some pirates would? thepiratebay itself is of course famously blocked in holland but there plenty of mirrors around. So I checked and yes, full downloads were available in various flavours for a total cost of ZERO bucks! And if you had issues, then the supplies answered your question in minutes. Not like the hours, days and counting before getting a reply from people I had payed money too. Many a reply to a piracy story has had comments similar to my story, so what is so special about it? Nothing. Just that after years of downloading, I have with MMO's gotten used again to paying and I didn't have any issue with paying for this game, if it had worked. But I do have an issue with paying 50 euro's for a game that can't be played and that now that I have read the forums I have seen is filled with bugs. Bugs the official forums have no answers for but that are fixed on piracy forums. To repeat myself, for this game the people that wanted me to pay did:

• Act as if my giving them money is a favor they are doing me and only when they feel like it, opening hours be damned.
• Not reply in a timely manner (or at all) to complaints
• Treat Europeans as second rate customers for no reason (what are they afraid of, that a world-wide release will overload the servers)
• Break consumer laws by selling a product not fit for its purpose (a game that can't even be installed is obviously not a fit product)

Meanwhile, the pirates offer:

• Early access
• No charge
• Free, fast useful support by computer experts.
• Service available any day of the week at any hour.

Sometimes the anti-piracy people complain the content industry can't compete with free. But come ON! I had PAYED already and the companies just said "no". Meanwhile the group that doesn't want money, said "yes". This is like paying a hooker to have an headache while your wife is stuffing your wallet full of money and begging for sex. Something ain't right!

And this is why I pirate. Because how else can I send the signal that I am not a sheep who will just keep turning the other cheek? Sure, there are sheep who advocate just that, just wait 3 days, it is not the developers fault etc etc. FUCK THAT! Nothing is every anybodies fault and I as a consumer should just take it all and keep quiet.

NO! And that is my reason why I post about being a pirate. Because just downloading alone isn't enough. Consumer boycotts don't work, there are to many sheep drowning out the silent protest of people like me who just see no other option but to not pay to make it clear I expect more service for my cash.

Because I see no other option. Mails go unanwered, forum posts get ignored, I can get my money back from the store and the sales clerk don't care, not his problem. How can I HURT that manager who thought it was a good idea to do a staggered release, hurt that Steam admin who didn't just flip a switch to prevent customers getting angry. How can I even get the companies involved to acknowledge my existence?

I can't. But I can keep my money in my pocket. That doesn't solve anything but it is a lot more fun having impotent nerd rage with cash then without.

Anyone want a beer over the backs of game developers who haven't learned that if they want an income, they need to tell their managers to not upset their customers?

This is how bad it is now. At some point a couple months ago, either /. or FF logged me out for some reason, and I literally couldn't be arsed to log back in. I checked in on the FP a few times a week, but it's as bad there as it's ever been. Paid trolls? Check. The first hundred or so comments containing nothing but moldy humour and politically retarded geeks? Check. The other half of the thread containing pointless, nitpicking digressions? Check.

Here's something interesting: According to a recent audit, I am part of the 1%. I'd been suspecting this for a while now, but to have some fussy accountant reveal your worth in 7 specific figures is another thing.

Mind you, that's all paper. Give me 30 days to liquidate, and I doubt I could break 50K. Still, nothing to sneer at, especially in these times.

Then again, contra Churchill, I've only gotten more liberal as I've aged, so I sleep well at night. There's never been, and never will be, any of that Galtian bullshit at any of my businesses. Oh noes, I'm only a paper millionaire because I believe in responsible work hours, comprehensive benefits, generous vacation time, and ridiculously competitive pay packages. Give me a friggin break.

Apologies for the shitty grammar. Apparently this new JE interface is even worse than I thought.

Dick Clark isn't dead, because Dick Clark can't die. They just ran into some temporary problems during a scheduled reboot.

Someone on Slashdot recently claimed I hadn't read Keep the Aspidistra Flying because I thought the ending was depressing. After I finished my PhD in 2007, I've managed to avoid the same fate and have successfully avoided having a real job for almost five years. I've done freelance programming and written four books, and had a lot of time to post on Slashdot (as you can tell from the fact that, so far, I've posted more than anyone else this quarter) and do open source stuff (Ohloh ranks me in the top 2,000 geeks with no life^W^W^W^Wopen source developers).

That's about to change though. I had two interesting job offers recently (I seem to get job offers from banks very often, but I have a very low tolerance for tedium, so I'd probably have been fired around day 3 if I'd taken any of them). One was from Google in Paris (yay!) but working on boring things (boo!). The other was from Cambridge University, which is about as well paid as you expect in academia (aww!) but basically involves working on the same stuff I do for fun (yay!) with some very intelligent people (yay!). Oh, and it's in a city where a quick search found four tango classes (yay!) and property prices not much lower than London (oops!) and which is both small and flat enough that I can cycle everywhere (yay!) and so does everyone else (look out!).

So, in a few weeks I'm moving to Cambridge. I'll miss looking out at the sea, but being able to dance tango more than once a week should be some compensation. There also seems to be a lively salsa scene, although having to learn yet another set of names for the same Rueda steps is going to be a little tiresome...

When I visited, I went for drinks with some of the makerspace guys the night before my interview (I have no idea how much I drank, but it didn't seem to affect my interview performance too badly...) and met someone who worked on the C++11 atomics spec (which I was in the middle of implementing at the time) and someone who had ported 2BSD to a 32-bit PIC with 128KB of RAM, so it definitely seems like a city with no shortage of geeks...

Most men will spend years, sometimes even decades, convincing their ladies to perform outré sexual acts.

As for me, it was trying to convince my wife to watch a DVD...with the commentary turned on.

So, as of Thursday night, success! We both thoroughly enjoyed Aliens, with has a nice 'blended' commentary track, involving Jimmy Cameron himself, ex-wife and producer Gale Ann Hurd, the venerable Stan Winston, along with a couple of FX leads, and rounded off by a quartet of Colonial Marines.

Sadly, no Sigourney Weaver, but honestly, she wasn't missed. On a related note, someone needs to give Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton and Lance Henriksen their own podcast. Great energy from those three.

After almost 7 long, painful years, my quest seems to be finally at an end.

In another couple weeks, I will finally be unemployed.

Sadly, that state of affiars won't last long, nor to my liking. I was hoping to find a nice boring regular job type job, or perhaps even consider staying home and be a domestic goddess, but it seems I've become far too valuable for that.

Which is a shame. I always took a certain amount of pride and happiness in being a regular working schlub, and well, I miss not having that, nor the future possibilty of it happening again.

Little Erick, in the throes of almost year-long deep depression, asks this question:

Have conservatives entered a suicide pact? Has the Republican Party, as a whole, done the same?

Yes, Erick, you have. This is what happens when you spend decades paying lip service to fundamentalism and oligarchy. This is what happens when you think labeling at least half your countrymen as traitors and subhumans is good strategy. This is what happens when you switch to the alternative fuels of hate and fear without doing any of that icky science beforehand to see if it was even a good idea in the first place.

And it's not like you haven't been warned, by no less than the people who originated some of these modern GOP tactics and strategies, that this would end up biting you in the ass. But since you've spent most of the last 40 years winning, you ignored it. But what you need to do, once you get your asses handed to you next year in an election that was only ever yours to lose, is sit the fuck down and do nothing else but some really hard thinking and soul searching, because shit like this

We do not have anyone on our side making the moral case for the free market.

The problem is that candidate, Jon Huntsman, decided to launch his campaign by giving conservatives a middle finger as he raced to get on The View.

we would be crazy not to reconsider Perry

It is hard to dislike a guy who can filet his opponent with a smile and a side of fava beans and a nice chianti.

...shows that you have zero clue of what the problems you're facing are.

Link is NSFW: http://www.moronail.net/img/15045_im-the-man

However, they did get something wrong. When I carry the groceries in toto, I do not need my entire arm, let alone both of them. One hand suffices. After all, I need the other hand free to get my keys and unlock the door.

Long time, no write. But I've been a good boy this year, kept my mouth shut and my ass out of trouble. So what I really, really, really want for Christmas this year is for Newt Gingrich to win the New Hampshire primary. The margin doesn't matter so long as he comes out on top after the voting.

Yours in Coca-Cola,

Captain Splendid

I haven't posted a journal here in almost three years, because I couldn't find the button to start a new entry. ...yeah, it turns out that it's at the bottom of the page.

So... hi, Slashdot. I used to be really active here, but now I mostly lurk and read. I've missed you.

This weekend (I think, maybe earlier), Slashdot published some statistics about the most active people. Apparently I am in the top four most active commenters for the past month and the past quarter. This is quite depressing.

In happier, and unrelated news, my FreeBSD commit bit was approved this weekend, so I can now cause untold destruction on the Internet at large...

Karl Rove just dickpunched Herman Cain so hard, he's now a eunuch. Guess It'll be Romney/Rubio then.

Hey! I am a finalist in the National Science Foundation's Visualization Challenge: Check it out and vote: Metabolomic Retina The full list of entries is here.