I don't have case citations at hand but you can look them up. In particular, find copyright cases surrounding player piano rolls, in which the courts ruled that it made absolutely no difference whether copyrighted works were used to control a machine.

John Philip Sousa was famously involved in some of those suits.

It sounds wonderful, but Texas scares the fuck out of me. All those guns and an express lane to the death chamber, it just smacks of too much trouble for my comfort zone.

But seriously, it sounds fun as hell. I remember doing some minor game design in High School back in 1980 for a mercenary rpg that was just pure guns, tactics and wild ideas of such. Friends and I would play test it, switch off administrating it so we could all try out our ideas. We had a blast with it. I can't imagine that being a job, it would be like cheating at life or something. Nobody is suppose to have that kind of fun and get paid for it. Everyday you do it, God has to punt a puppy into outer space when nobody is looking. Just to balance the universe out, you know. (just kidding)

Your expletive-laden post makes clear your generally a-social tendencies. You have a small circle of close friends and F--- everybody else.

Fine. But don't think you are the majority.

You should read up on some other places in the U.S. where it happens frequently. For one thing, since you said growing up, I'm going to guess they just didn't have the sort of property a cop might covet.

You should google civil forfieture and read a few of the hits, you might be surprised.

I guess the truth hurts sometimes.

I have laid out reasons that MS made no significant positive contributions that wouldn't have been done s well or better than others. The question then is would those others have done as much to impede progress as MS? Let's face it, MS has multiple convictions on every contenant but Antartica for various illegal business practices.

Precisely! Adults are a bit more creative, too. We might say something hyperbolic like, "What kind of faggotry is this?!" instead, for instance.

Not to hijack this rant, but that's one of the problems with Google Talk: words have meanings. For instance:

* talk
* voice
* chat

See how someone might get a little confused by what "Google Talk" is? They've got a branding problem with the product, because many people still don't know what it is (as a product). Remember, we're talking about a population who probably, by and large, just thinks that a pop-up with a friend sending them a message in their email is just another email interface.

Now ask yourselves, do you think "What do you mean you've got to put this @jabber.org email address at the end of your hangout to talk?" would go over well? I've heard people (younger people, granted) communicate with each other and say "what's your gmail address?" and they just share the prefix in return. Many of these people don't seem to realize there is anything out there aside from gmail for mail, or that gmail is in no way exclusive. For younger people, it's all there has been for as long as they remember. (People who were 8 when Google came out are now 18...)

(Hilarious and ironic? Is that a challenge?)

What's hilarious and ironic is that you here are doing the Exact Same Thing.

Whoa there, buddy. I'm an innocent witness! I told you something fascinating (IMHO) that I saw happen in 1985 and now you're giving me shit for it?

Fine. Next time someone tells you they're concerned that "hackers" may have influenced their computer, I'll just let you go on thinking that they're bragging about how awesome their computer is. Then we'll see who looks like the insensitive clod.

Later you'll find out, briefly wonder why Sloppy didn't tell you about the new meaning of "hacker," and then you'll remember this day. You'll come crawling back, on your hands and knees, offering to do to all sorts of gay things to earn my forgiveness.

Genie's out of the bottle. You can whine and bitch it all you want about how stupid it might be, but "gay" has at least three meanings now, and some hipster (THERE! Now you can accuse me of labeling people) will come along and explain "gay" is up to five meanings now. And maybe then I'll join your side, saying, "Enough. I don't want to know."

Heh.

It's at the other end of the college curriculum, but I had a somewhat similar experience. I arrived at college having passed AP Calculus but without having taken any trigonometry. After a couple of semesters I realized I really needed to address my lack of trig knowledge, so I enrolled in a course. The prof who was teaching it recognized my name and asked me to come talk to her. She suggested that I drop the course and instead spend the semester grading papers for the class, rather than taking it.

I did as she suggested, and I think I learned more trigonometry than any of the students in the class.

...and nobody's getting fat, except mama cass.

This is the first time I've cared about or enjoyed a piece of Onion content in more than half a decade. Thank you, SternisheFan!

I don't think you understand how the market works.

Five billion dollars profit each year for the last several years isn't good -- it's "stagnation". :P

From what I've seen, Flickr is where you post your photos mostly for yourself. It's a storage service, primarily. I mean, it's not like people are spending their time socializing and perusing Flickr unless they're specifically looking for something and Google Image Search has landed them there.

Tumblr is not a photo storage service and is primarily used for people to dump images of stupid shit that doesn't belong to them and doesn't really have much in the way of social features, either.

I really don't see any relation between the two, other than they're both on the internet and both are spelled stupidly.

Let's be honest, here...

The type of person who uses Tumblr is also the type of person who _already_ has a Yahoo! account and spends half their day logged in here playing Puzzle Pirates or some shit.