A friend once brought a rather heavy book backpacking, and once he was done reading a chapter, he tore out the pages and left them behind to save his back. You can't do that with an e-book reader.

Look at what America has become since 9/11.

When I was a kid it was popular to point to various things in the USSR like the inability to travel freely without "showing your papers" as evidence of totalitarian oppression. Here in 2010 "showing your papers" is as American as apple pie! Fuck, kids can't even bring techie looking projects to school without triggering a terror scare and being in danger of prosecution under insane laws that make it a crime to do anything that some uneducated moron might confuse with a terrorist act.

They terrorists HAVE ALREADY WON, no doubt about it.

I was able to reproduce it a moment ago by viewing all the posts for the Favorite Editor poll.

In the process, Firefox 3.5.3 asked me twice "A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete." and I hit continue both times in order to get it to load. My CPU was pegged once the initial part of the page loaded until the page finished loading.

Considering that it will sometimes take my computer 30 seconds to deal with all the javascript when I view a poll, I'd say yes. Funny that you post that websites don't use much JavaScript on a website that obviously uses a lot of it.

Thanks! I'm looking forwards to cleaning out that binary blob when I get some free time.

My room mate has a Brother 2070N, and while it works fairly well under Linux, it uses a binary blob to convert from what ever format you give it to print to it's custom internal binary format.

I normally don't mind this too much, except they only support x86, and I wanted to install the drivers on an old PPC that I have lying around and use as a server.

While what you say is true, it doesn't go far enough. Net Neutrality says: not only do they have to allow Skype, they can't charge the company running Skype extra for letting you get to it, or letting you get to it as quickly or as reliably as you do to anything else. Without full end-to-end protection against gotcha-games like this, the situation will hardly improve.

Uranus needs to be renamed back to Herschel, after the guy who discovered it. Stupid jokes come up every time the planet is mentioned.

Ah, back in the Soviet Union days, the social networking at least made sense and didn't leave any incriminating evidence. Back then, after all, "social networking" was just notes on the kitchen table:

"I've gone to the women's activism group at the collective meeting hall. The supper is in the oven. Long live the Party! -Mother."
"I've gone to the Young Pioneer Palace to meet my friends. Long live the Party! -Son."
"I've gone to the political rally in the city. Long live the Party! -Dad."
"I've stolen everything of value in this house. Long live the Party! -Thief."

See? New technology isn't always better.