If people I knew started e-mailing me pictures of their cats I'd be most obliged to redirect their mail to /dev/null. However, if people ran their own website or blog or whatever I would happily subscribe to their RSS feed and ignore the junk I didn't care about. And the best part of it is that there's no middle man, making money from it, datamining it, or whatever.

None of the features facebook/Google+/whatever offers wasn't available before all of this "social networking" craze took hold. Somehow I was able to attend BBQs, see pictures from people's holidays (and cats), discuss stuff that mattered to groups of people (and with less inane bullshit in between on how the kids just puked on the carpet, including a video on youtube). Somehow people seemed to be more aware of the fact that when they put things on a website it's there for the world at large to see, but instead now we get people complaining "My privacy options".

I get the feeling eternal september got upped to a whole new level, where "Me too" has been replaced with +1 or "Like".

Perhaps it's all a big cock-up?

I remember it well, and it was the first steps for me into the dark art of understanding how computers work. I can only thank videogames of that era for making me start a voyage into a new realm. Understanding memory, learning about DMA and IRQs, getting a modem to work, setting up a LAN, trying my hand at programming, ... I learned a great deal from all that and it got me interested in a subject I had little interest in before.

Thanks DOS games! You've set me onto a career which I enjoy tremendously (despite becoming such a cynic).

She did it twice? She must've been very thorough.

The launch aside, it's yet another terrible incarnation of a great series. I've been peeking at a few videos on youtube because I was hoping for something with a little depth to it, but it's even below my worst expectations (and given Simcity Societies, the expectations were already pretty low).

Simcity 4 with NAM installed still beats this game gameplay-wise hands down from what I can see. It's one of the few games that get reinstalled every X years on my computer. It's ridiculously in-depth if you want it to be, and you can add plenty of mods to make your roads curvy/circular with overpasses and underpasses and however the hell you please.

This has nothing to do with "bill of rights", it's just a bad game with stupid DRM. No need to write a longwinded document nobody's going to read, which will immediately get dismissed with the word "entitled". Just don't buy it.

In fact, don't buy games that use a mechanism you don't agree with, if that be day 1 DLC, the form of DRM they're using, or if you expect them of eating babies. Play another game and have fun. Take those 60 bucks and buy something else.

Oh great, we've just taken the first step into creating Cranium Rats. Bring enough of those together and there'll be talk about overthrowing the bonds human opression.

Yes, a splendid trackrecord to boot as well...

It's the rolling naked in hundred dollar bills that has them scared really. The papercuts would be horrifying.

I think if you were a photographer looking to have such a feature you should just hire a reasonably competent webdeveloper for a day and have them setup such a thing for you. Can't be more than 20 lines of python/perl/php code really.

You used to get people who grudgingly went to your site to click save as...

You get the same amount of traffic (unique IPs), but they're just going to the image, not your webpage. Bandwidth use is hardly going to change. You're not going to see an influx of new users if your main source of hits was google image search.

If your content outside of the images was not worth the users attention, you'll get less actual visitors. If you don't like it, there's been ways to block this kind of use for years, but that won't increase the influx of users either. Most of the complaints about this feature are lazy webmasters who see easy money evaporate. And man, those ad revenues sure are worth so much moneys... Provide actual content, build up a community, offer features your community wants, et voila, you have recurring traffic that doesn't leech your bandwith via google image search.

Don't worry, practically everyone is using adblock anyway. I'd like to repeat my sentiments on the whole "The income of my business depends on ad revenue" thing: if you are going to sponsor your hosting solely on the income provided to you by advertising, don't be surprised if you're at the mercy of the ad-network and the users not even downloading your ads. It's like all common sense has gone out of the window with website hosting.

In this case, don't be surprised if Google decides that it's in it's best interests to screw you out of ad income, because the chances are high that they're the ones providing you ad income in the first place. Make your site worthwhile to visit, and users like me will come back and even *gasp* turn off adblock or pay for some feature you have that's useful to us. If you had that kind of service, you wouldn't be bitching about ad revenue, you'd have more interesting accounting problems. But if you're just hosting lolcats image macros, good luck with that.

For gods sake man, spoonfeed them some examples or we'll never see it happen. Like

• Sith & Messy
• Cold
• Kohlslanikov
• Ligal

Not to mention the all time classic:

• Heckling Cock

Nuclear simply isn't an option in Belgium at the moment. After Fukushima the usual scaremongering got far far worse, which isn't to say that some of the criticisms are valid, but the scaremongering extends into the realm of the unscientific at times. Of course the nuclear industry has been running save-face ad campaigns, but the power company exploiting the nuclear power plants has come under fire by the press for making record profits while refusing to pay the rather new nuclear tax. To add to that, after inspection several nuclear reactors had been found to have cracks in their housing and needed to be shut down for repairs.

So in short, our government bows to public pressure to shut down the plants, but does so in an unrealistic schedule (that is to say, without a significant price hike due to the need to import more power). Two reactors have been shut down and it is currently unknown when they will restart (last inspection revealed that the cracks were fixed, but the committee is scheduling another inspection soon, and I haven't followed the news surrounding this). Electrabel is currently playing a high stakes pokergame with our government regarding taxes and the continued operation of the nuclear power plants. There are other issues with the policy around our electricity network, which are mostly problems our government has created for itself such as "green power certificates" (for a lack of better translation) which boosted the sales of roof mounted solar power units, but ended up costing the taxpayers unable to afford these units far too much, as businesses starting installing a ton of these units, and many more of these kinds of issues that are not related to the whole nuclear debate...

Aside from that there is a heavy emphasis on uninformed misinformation from both sides through social media. It was only two weeks ago that I saw a map of the tidal effects of the march 2011 tsunami in Japan being passed off as a "fallout map" of Fukushima which covered the entire globe. To give you an idea of how ridiculous it was, it was NOAA imagery with a goddamn legend attached, which of course nobody bothered to read. It's much more fun to assume that the red part of the map is fallout. It's needless to say that the nuclear fans are spreading their own misinformation: such as fear of power shortages, blackouts, peak power usage causing overload to renewable energy resources, etc etc etc. While I'm not saying that people are not allowed to have their opinions on the matter, in fact I'd encourage it, but I'd prefer people to at least look at facts rather than the hearsay passed through social networks.

I can only applaud efforts to have more environmentally friendly power sources, and it is in my opinion important in the both long and short term to focus on developing better and more efficient technology and deploying it more widespread. For the short term, I think our government is trying to be too ambitious with their stance and it will end up costing Joe Average and small/medium sized business, only to prolong the date of our nuclear exit when faced with our powerconsumption. At the core of the matter lies that both businesses and homes are using a lot of power, and while price can significantly drop that power consumption I fear that many families who are currently already struggling to pay their bills will end up becoming the victim of this, a group slowly but surely on the rise.

Some would argue that my stance is wanting to have my cake and eat it, but I like to think of it as not putting all my eggs in one basket, especially not at an economically critical time like this.