Try Gandi. Their contract is written for clarity, and specifies in bold text on page 2 that "You are the owner of your domain name." The phrase "sole discretion" does not appear anywhere in the document. Do note that they sometimes add some terms and conditions specific to the type of extension you register (e.g. .com, .org, etc), so you'll want to double check those.

Their prices are middling; not the cheapest but not very pricey either. I've found the service excellent in the ten years I've been using them, and I've never once come across any kind of shenanigans story about them.

They're based in France, so any political crap which affects their service is likely to be French or EU based. And frankly, both France and the EU generally have saner laws than the U.S. when it comes to Internet stuff. (Generally! Not always.)

Take a look at the Pathfinder Society. It's *mostly* focused on the US, but there are games in other countries.

Other than that, try looking in gaming forums. I'm partial to the Pathfinder stuff, and they have very active forums where you can likely find a game in your area.

Last but not least, you could bite the bullet, become a GM, and recruit some players. There are even "beginners box" type products for exactly this situation. Then you'd have a game.

No. You're not like "the majority of the population": you have a problem with authority, while most people don't.

The original poster is correct. The majority of the population is very likely to go along with the demands of someone perceived to be in authority. As evidence, I direct your attention to the Milgram Experiments, in which random guys from off the street were asked to administer electrical shocks to total strangers, starting at five volts and going all the way to 450 volts in small increments. The subjects of the experiment believed that the shocks were part of an experiment designed to test the effects of punishment on memory, when in fact the person supposedly receiving the shocks was an actor. And here are the results:

Well, how many people would go all the way to 450 volts in that situation? Milgram asked 39 psychiatrists and they all said NO ONE would. If you ask ordinary people the same question, they say only a pathological fringe element, perhaps one or two percent of the population, would go all the way. Certainly people know they themselves WOULD NOT, COULD NOT, EVER, NEVER do such a thing. So if you know that you would not, could not, that’s what almost everyone says.

Milgram ran 40 men, one at a time, in the situation I just described. All 40 shocked the Learner after he started grunting; all 40 gave the “household voltage” 120 volt shock. Thirty-four went past the 150 volt mark where the Learner demanded to be set free, which means 85% of the Teachers paid less attention to the Learner’s undeniable rights than they did to the Experimenter’s insistence that the study continue. Thereafter a few more people dropped out, one here and one there. Altogether fifteen men got up the gumption to eventually tell the Experimenter, “No, I won’t.” But the other twenty-five men went to 450 volts and threw the switch over and over until the Experimenter told them to stop.

That’s not NONE of them. That’s 62%.

(Writeup by Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarians, pages 225-226)

This and similar experiments have shown repeatedly that resistance to authority is the exception, not the rule. The TSA counts on that.

Both ends of this are wrong, at least in the short to medium term: our data's not that accessible, and most things you call the help desk for are not Googlable (if that's a word). Things like JPL's internal policies and procedures, for example -- we have an internal, Google-based search engine, but it's not able to find everything by a long shot.

Also, as it happens, our help desk is very good -- even if it is run by Lockheed Martin -- and it would actually be a shame to see it go away. This might change someday, but right now, humans are irreplaceable.

Here in North Dakota, we only have three seasons:

• Winter
• Flood
• Construction

Winter lasts 7-8 months, of course. Flood and Construction can overlap. If there's no snow on the ground, much of the state feels a deep sense of uneasiness arising from chronological uncertainty.

These LEGO figurines look awesome! My hat's off to the JUNO team!

We sent (flattened) LEGO figurines aboard the MER landers, too (not on the rovers proper). Their names were Biff Starling and Sandy Moondust, if I recall correctly. See my blog for a terrific color picture of Spirit's LEGO figurine before she drove away.

The MER landing system was pretty damn complicated as well -- you shouldn't think otherwise just because it worked perfectly, twice. (And the late add of the DIMES system, which used images taken during descent to make decisions about rocket firing, made things even more complex but probably saved Spirit.)

I know some of the engineers working on the MSL landing system, and they're well aware that it all needs to work properly. They're also terrifically smart, the kind of people who can make this work if anyone can.

Do I think it's a guaranteed success? Of course not: guaranteed successes don't happen in this business. But I also recognize that it's not more complex than it needs to be, to solve this very hard problem.

... we'll have sufficient bandwidth that video shot from a mobile device can be uploaded straight to the web, with only a brief "buffering" stop on the actual filming device. Then they can confiscate the device as much as they like, but the video will be beyond their grasp due to the technical difficulty of 1) figuring out where it went, 2) getting the host to take it down, and 3) doing so before the original filmer (or friends) can spread copies of it all over everywhere.

Shortly after that, some bright lad will suggest jamming devices to disrupt the transmission, which will pose all kinds of problems for them, such as disrupting their own signals. So then they may try short range hand-held EMP devices, which will work great right up until they fry somebody's pacemaker. Meanwhile, people will busily be miniaturizing the technology even further, so that observers could be filming the cops' activity without any obvious sign of it.

And eventually they'll give up and conclude that they'll just have to put up with being filmed by whoever happens to be standing around.

Ah, technology.

(Yeesh, let's try that again.)

Here's a remix of that xkcd strip that the MER team liked better than the original: http://twitpic.com/52etk7.

Goodbye, Spirit, love, and well done.

What should simply happen is that universities should publish their own journals, online, using the simple, cheap web distribution methods.

Interestingly The University of Michigan is doing exactly that. They combined their university press with their library, and shifted the press focus to digital instead of print. As their site says, "The press mission is to use the best emerging digital technology to disseminate such information as freely and widely as possible while preserving the integrity of published scholarship." They also do some print-on-demand stuff for people who want paper copies.

I hope to see this approach adopted by a great many more universities. It cuts profiteering parasitic publishers out of the loop, and simultaneously reinvigorates the university library by expanding its mission to include publication and dissemination of new research in addition to the more traditional roles of archiving existing materials.

If you haven't already, check your university library's holdings for those. They have likely already paid a great deal of money to crappy parasitic publishers for access to databases full of journals, and you have to check through the library web site. Your library's holdings usually won't show up in Google results, again because the crappy parasitic publishers don't let Google index the library's licensed databases. Pro tip: look for a "journal title" search or something similar, and search for the title of the publication first, then narrow down to the specific issue/volume containing the article you want.