"Spirit of the law" is more of a liberal thing. Our current court leans a bit to the conservative side, and they tend to be more concerned with "letter of the law". Of course, both sides would probably dispute such simplistic characterizations, but that's pretty much how it works out in practice.

Yeah, I have to admit that it sounds like nothing but a paycheck. Given that the last two Terminator films were pretty forgettable, I'm hoping that they just do a reboot. Wipe everything clean, start with a brand new story, and get a real director (with a real name, not a nickname).

If they do a reboot, they could bring in Arnie in a small role. Make him a military leader responsible for pushing through Skynet, rewarded for his years of service to the country by being the first 3D model used to create a humanoid Terminator. That could work. It would even explain why he's 60-65 years old, yet the Terminator looks half that age. See? It's not hopeless. It's just incredibly unlikely that this will turn into a good film.

Yeah. It's impressive that he's gotten this far, but the credulous, easily-impressed headline (and story) left me similarly annoyed. It's basically some manga nerd remaking the classic 80s graphical adventure games. Instead of calling it what it is, they decided to run it as some kind of revolutionary, radical new approach to video games. The guy himself isn't necessarily responsible for that, though. He has no control over how the media present his story. Sounds like an decent guy with a decent project, but it's not really all that interesting to me. Aren't most indie games made by guys who think their ideas are underrepresented and underappreciated in mainstream gaming?

The United States doesn't really have a left-wing party. There's the Green Party and the Socialist Party, but neither of them is relevant in any meaningful way. I suggest that you vote with the Greens or Socialists, if you're truly interested in left-wing politics, even if they are irrelevant. It may not accomplish much, but you'll be able to sleep better at night. If you're more of a centrist or right winger, then I suggest the Libertarian Party, which are at least supportive of freedom, even if they are free market fundamentalists. I can respect their stance on freedom, at the very least... which is more than I can do for most political parties.

There's also the Social Justice Party, but I don't know much about them. The Greens piss me off every once in a while, with their anti-technology, neo-luddite rhetoric. Social Justice seems like a decent alternative, if you're into progressive, left-wing politics and don't want to go full-on socialist.

Yeah, I actually got kind of excited, too. It was stupid of me to think that they were actually going to change something that matters.

It seems like Mozilla does nothing but try to piss off their old-school users, while ineffectually trying to appeal to Chrome users. Some of their changes have been good, and some have even been great, but the vast majority have just been perplexing.

The director is known for intelligent and creative science fiction films, which kind of puzzles me. Why, if you had that kind of reputation, would you make a film based on an MMORPG? There must either be a huge budget (which would be tempting to work with, after the smaller productions, I suppose) or a very good script. Despite my cynicism, I choose to believe that the script is insightful and well-written. Unfortunately, Wikipedia says the budget is around $220M, which makes my cynicism increasingly difficult to ignore. On the other hand, if they're spending this much money, they're probably going to try to do it right.

Hell, I think voting is kind of pointless, but I was trying to limit myself to just Internet activism.

Regardless, I finally voted again, in 2012, after 20 years of boycotting the voting booth. It felt as pointless as ever, but I got a nice sticker that says I voted.

I agree that it seems that way, at first. However, it seems unlikely to actually affect meaningful change. More likely, it will either be ignored or eliminated. A petition has just as much chance of scaring politicians into changing their behavior, and it doesn't bring about connotations of vigilantism and what I suspect will come to be known as "Internet terrorism".

Signing Internet petitions is only marginally less useless and pointless than harassing government employees. In fact, if I made a list of the most pointless activism on Internet, they would be:

1. Printing form letters and mailing them to Congresspeople
2. Writing e-mails to Congresspeople
3. Signing Internet petitions
4. Complaining loudly on Internet forums
5. Hacking and vandalism
6. Publishing a batshit crazy manifesto
7. DDOSing the government
8. Sending death threats via e-mail

That's in vague order of (comparatively) least pointless to most pointless.

We shouldn't have to click on the links, just to understand what the summary is about.

"Will donglegate affect your decision to attend pycon?"
vs
"Will the controversy over alleged sexism affect your decision to attend pycon?"

Hmm. Good point. Next time, I'll remember to ramp up the emotional content.

Opinions are cheap. Reporters cost money.

Increasingly, people only seem to care about being outraged, anyway. Just look at all the blogs out there -- they're basically nothing more than "outrage of the day" articles, cynically designed to appeal to shallow, emotional outbursts. Slashdot is often guilty of this, as well. I'm not sure whether this trend took hold in Old Media or New Media first, but it has totally dominated New Media, and now the Old Media are struggling to stay relevant, by showing they can be just as fluffy and reactionary as the New Media. In some ways, I think this is just a natural progression of trends started in the 1990s. Hell, maybe it started a lot earlier than that, but that's when I remember things getting worse. My parents would probably say it started around 60s or 70s.