After the year-and-a-half stint on SSRIs I had a year ago I've resolved to use them only if I somehow wind up with clinical depression or get a crippling disease that ruins my life anyway. Undeath is a drastic solution and not one that should be applied lightly. But hey, at least they do work.

So were the hippies, so were the punks?

So fire it in short bursts then. Mob advances, blast them with a flash, wait, flash them again?

I was the biggest FF7 fanboy you could imagine, so I might be biased, but Cloud Strife being a "sham" is a core part of the story i think, together with Aeris being the "madonna" to Tifa's... more down to earth personality. There's an underlying story about ideals and dreams and how we live up to them - and what inferiority complexes and narcissism do to people and relationships.

Also, on a more cheerful and lively note, I think one of the songs on ohGrs most recent album is about the events leading up to this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8fFqEdQQZQ

I take your story at face value, but remember that the things they're known for doing are hacking for fun and political attention-grabbing. Presumably they could have just stopped. I guess they might have felt pressure about having a proverbial damocles sword above their heads for years to come?

They're all human, obviously. And perhaps the risk aversion that would have driven them to meticulously fly under the radar ultimately would have prevented them from creating such a spectacle in the first place?

Yes, that was my point.

NATO is a military alliance between a subset of UN members - it would exist as long as the member states found it useful to exist, would it not?

Viktor Suvorov, "Inside the Soviet Army"? The laugh-or-cry gallows humour in that book is absolutely brilliant. You really feel with the author. It reminded me about Solsjenitsyns unsentimental yet gripping descriptions of the gulags.

I'm a partial redhead, but I have sucky pain tolerance. My sister and father on the other hand... dad had a bit of a stomach ache one day, that just wouldn't go away. Then it did, rather suddenly. When he went to the hospital he was ash-grey and rambling; turns out it was a ruptured appendix. A person with a more normal pain treshold would surely have gone much sooner and spared himself all of the trouble involved in having your insides surgically cleaned from pus.

They're both dark red-brownish, dad is red-skinned and my sister wound up olive.

Nah. I've had stuff bought for me by my parents, never had to do the dishes or laundry or cooking, or even cleaning. Quoting Ministry: "I've never had to work a day in my life." Still, I feel compelled to conduct myself professionally when at work. It just seems natural.

Good luck in your future endeavours.

Whenever this comes up it seems like the music industry behaves like a frightened animal in every single instance. Why doesn't it try to play it cool? Surely they must realize how these things sound to others? Or is "I want everything and the kitchen sink and I want it now" an actual, valid legal tactic that's reasonable given their circumstances?

Oh come on. We are just recently moving into large-scaled privately-owned healthcare here in Sweden and the only fault of the system is that it's a bit inefficient and/or understaffed. You pay for medical care up to about 300 USD per year, same for medication. There are no death panels, nor are people left to die if their treatment gets too expensive. Granted, the proposed "Obamacare" system is different in that people are apparently locked into private insurance schemes which does sound like a rather convoluted solution to the problem, but it's still taxpayer-funded social insurance right?