Comment Re:Why bother? (Score 1) 295
In Opera, I've found that if you view the comments.pl page for stories (the one without the summary at the top) the comments' stylesheets look much better.
Comment Retaw (Score 1) 313
2:1 oxygen:hydrogen ratio
O2H.... That's, like, anti-water!
iPhone 3GS Finally Hacked 376
Well, the inevitable hacking of Apple's latest flavor of iPhone has happened. Named "purplera1n," the tool will only allow installation of unauthorized applications instead of a full unlock. "The purplera1n jailbreak will free your iPhone from the limitations imposed on it by AT&T and Apple. After jailbreaking, a user will be able to customize the iPhone with home-screen wallpapers and third-party ringtones. But the biggest advantage of jailbreaking is the support of unapproved apps such as iBlackList (blacklists and whitelists for contacts) and many others."
Comment Re:Don't blame the system (Score 2, Insightful) 574
Not everyone has the resources and energy to constantly fight when their own lives and freedoms are on the line. They were ultimately intimidated by the state and gave in. The system is indeed at fault here.
Comment Re:This is why they were prosecuted (Score 1) 574
So, your traditional porn is still safe in the US. There is porn and then there is sick minded porn. This addresses the more violent side that porn can take.
Just beacuse I don't enjoy something doesn't mean others don't have the right to.
The least popular speech is the speech that needs the most protection. No one's rights here were infringed until the porn producers were sent to prison, and the only offenders are agents of the government.
Comment Re:Privacy? Huh? (Score 1) 574
All these doom-and-gloom "what happened to the US" posts ignore that obscenity law used to be much, much stricter.
Right, but we were hoping that they were gone for good! It's mainly a feeling of "how much progress have we really made if people can still be thrown in a prison cell for hurting people's feelings?"
Squeezing a Wikipedia Snapshot Onto an 8GB iPhone 169
blackbearnh writes with this excerpt from O'Reilly Radar "Think about Wikipedia, what some consider the most complete general survey of human knowledge we have at the moment. Now imagine squeezing it down to fit comfortably on an 8GB iPhone. Sound daunting? Well, that's just what Patrick Collison's Encyclopedia iPhone application does. App Store purchasers of Collison's open source application can browse and search the full text of Wikipedia when stuck in a plane, or trapped in the middle of nowhere (or, as defined by AT&T coverage...)"
Comment Re:Privacy? Huh? (Score 1) 574
Actually, sodomy laws were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2001.
Comment Re:It's vs its (Score 1) 133
That kind of mistake is a huge cognitive speed bump for many readers.
You are assuming that many readers actually RTFS. I, for one, take offense to that notion!
Comment Re:Not entirely (Score 2, Informative) 174
If you look at the link to the so-called "refuting" article, it is about an entirely different topic, morning sickness. The text "oral" and "sex" do not appear in the article. The text "semen" appears, but only as a subset of the word advertisement!
Comment Re:Virtual murder isn't and cannot be murder. (Score 1) 473
When you try to shut down a conversation by invoking the idea of censorship rather than deal with the issues at hand, you perversely prove the point of the censors: that people are too simple-minded and incapable of true reflection to be allowed to manage their own media consumption.
But you were responding to a post which said that virtual murder is not murder and was referring to laws regarding such, which would thus make censorship be the issue at hand.
I agree with your general point that some games have no inherent merit, and that someone who is always playing such a game is likely to have serious problems.
That being said, that doesn't mean that anyone who plays that game is racist, just in the same sense that not everyone who watches Birth of a Nation is racist.
Nothing posted indicates that people shouldn't be allowed to manage their own media consumption.
Comment Re:I don't get it (Score 1) 201
I understand the "papers please" argument, and reject it because we simply do not have the manpower to set up checkpoints and run around asking everyone for "papers, please".
We do have such checkpoints. Various cities have them under the guise of protecting you against drunk drivers. Almost no one cares.
Comment Re:I'll buy it...but... (Score 2, Informative) 737
Don't buy it if LAN isn't supported. Starcraft is the only PC game I've ever bought and I was planning on buying SC2, but I won't purchase it without LAN support. Hopefully other potential players will do the same.
Comment Re:I win against blue ray every day (Score 2, Insightful) 460
So when consumers buy/rent a new BluRay/DVD, they may have to hook their player up to the Internet to download the software to play it? I can't wait to explain this to my grandmother, who has no internet connection. If she asks, I will tell her to skip BluRay.
Comment Re:Virtual murder isn't and cannot be murder. (Score 1) 473
If you know someone that is always playing "Virtual KKK," running around lynching black men and burning crosses in a virtual setting, are you going to say, "oh, he's not a racist, those aren't real people?" No, you're going to make a connection between the representation of a thing and the thing itself.
And while he may be a racist, that doesn't mean the government has any business censoring such a game.
