If that were true, I'd expect Sydney, Australia to be a much larger tech hub that it currently is. We're basically the gay capital of the southern hemisphere, but all you're find here are some crappy branch offices of foreign corporations and boring local systems integrators.

So I think you're wrong about that, but one thing you said was spot on - what attracts both gays or geeks is *other* gays or geeks.

The fact that they both congregate in San Fran is pretty much a coincidence, I think.

And that will undo everything, will it? All those kids will be A-OK again?

Capital punishment solves nothing, and just feeds the basest desire of humans for revenge.

This is a terrible crime against society, I agree, and the punishment should be banishment. The system we have for that is called prison, and they should be going there for a very long time.

While they're there, society should find a way to make sure that such a thing never happens again.

This is the proper way to do things. Merely calling for the guilty parties' deaths is a simplistic, brutal way to conduct proceedings that should be nothing but a memory of the dark ages.

You know, I like Star Wars, but I don't DEEPLY DEEPLY LOVE IT like many here. Yeah I know, turn in my geek card, etc, except I DEEPLY DEEPLY LOVE a lot of anime, so I think I should get to keep it.

Anyway, bearing that in mind, I didn't really mind the "new" Star Wars. Actually, I liked it (except Jar Jar, obviously), and thought all those people complaining about how Lucas was basically ass-raping their childhood innocence, etc, were kind of overreacting.

But holy shit, now I know what they meant. I fucking love Cowboy Bebop, I fucking LOVE it, and now Hollywood is going to fuck it up the ass.

There is NO WAY this movie is going to be a worthy continuation or even a semi-accurate movie version of one of my favourite anime series of all time. NO FUCKING WAY. They just cannot do it, Hollywood just cannot make that kind of movie. Cowboy Bebop is deeply nihilistic in a way Hollywood just does not understand. I have nothing against Keanu Reeves but there is no way he can possibly even comprehend the character of Spike. No-one like him can. I am sorry but happy dumb Americans living in sun-drenched California just cannot understand this kind of emotion. They don't even know what to shoot for.

Faye Valentine? Dear god it'll probably be Lucy Liu. Why not eh? It's an "asian" series so we should get someone from "asia"! Argh!

God, I'm sorry Star Wars fans. I should have fought for you. "Next they came for the Star Wars fans, but I did not speak up, for I was not a Star Wars fan" ... well now they've come for me ...

My company started writing a big app in Rails. We hit limitations (for us) fairly quickly so just started replacing the bits we wanted to work differently. The great thing about Ruby is you can just switch stuff in and out. The great thing about Rails is that it's well-designed enough that you can do that fairly easily.

Sessions, for example. We wanted to share sessions between sites, so just stopped using the Rails one and started using ours. We just put a new session class system in a gem, require it, and talk to that instead of the built-in. Works brilliantly and with a little finesse you can make it totally transparent.

I think the key is to think of Rails as a framework - as in, a literal scaffolding that you place things in. The basic structure is sound enough and very useful. It's filled with some useful default code, but if that doesn't meet your needs, feel free to start replacing it wih things that do.

That's less than 500 a day! Christ, my personal blog gets more than that. Double that, in fact. And it's not like I put any effort into it whatsoever. It's roughly half talking about bands I like and half ranting about Ruby. No professional ambitions or concessions whatsoever. Not even updated regularly.

So isn't that pathetically low by any modern standard? Who could possibly make any money at all on 14k uniques a month?

I was under the impression that numbers like this were really low and basically meant nothing. "Enough traffic to call yourself popular" starts at about a quarter million uniques a month in my mind, and that would be the absolute minimum.

Don't mean to add insult to injury here, but if you've been soldiering on for more than 6 years and have less traffic than some random guy's zero-effort personal blog, then maybe you should just give up.

Huh? That's how their names are written. And you wouldn't be able to communicate anyway. Go find a Chinese speaker, it's not exactly hard.

And in case you haven't noticed, spammers just use fake names - when they register domains at all, that is. So what's the difference?

You better get used to seeing Chinese characters around, by the way, with no effort being made to transcribe to english-equivalent. There's a lot more of them than there are us. Why should they bother?

Only an American would ever claim, with a straight face, that the BBC is "far left" and the likes of CNN, MSNBC, etc are on the "left".

You have no perspective at all. Your entire frame of reference is wrong. I wonder if you even know what these words "left" and "right" are supposed to mean.

I don't know much about "DU" and "Daily KOS" but unless they insistently call for the immediate transformation of the USA into a soviet-style planned economy then they are not "far, far left". I can't really imagine such sites being all that popular in the US, or anywhere really.

The BBC is mildly left, what you would expect from a government-run service in a fairly centrist country like Britain.

The mainstream US news services you list are all varying degrees of right wing. Do you seriously think that someone in an actual left-leaning country like Norway or France would look at CNN and think, wow, this is quite lefty? Do you think the Chinese government looks at MSNBC and thinks it shares a common political outlook?

Fox is kind of quasi right-wing with a strong dose of ignorance, religion and rabble-rousing. I don't know much about Rush Limbaugh but if even you describe him as "right" then I assume he is some far-out fringe wacko, along with Coulter who is so mixed up I can't even tell - nothing but a grab-bag of populist "hot button" issues, mostly self-contradictory, appealing to disenfranchised types with low self-esteem and looking for someone to blame.

You call for a news organisation that hits "right down the centre". Ironically, the BBC is probably the most neutral and reliably "centre" news service in English. The fact that you describe them as "far left" indicates to me that the problem is actually your radically off-centre frame of reference.

You seem to define "left" as "anything I disagree with", and the more you disagree with them, the further left they are. This is a definition the rest of the world, and possibly even the rest of the US, does not share. In other words, you're wrong - very, very wrong.

One more point. Al Jazeera is becoming a fairly respected news service these days. It's free speech, free market, mildly right wing but they do their best to be impartial. On the occasions I have watched their coverage I have been pretty impressed by their fairness.

My question is, is Al Jazeera mildly right wing like everyone else thinks, or are they "wrong" and therefore "left" according to your twisted, self-serving worldview?

Maybe the best way for me to let you know how much you are projecting your own ideas onto that paragraph you excerpted from the story is by telling you I have no idea, without further information, who or what this "cheap shot" you complain about is supposed to be at.

Is the "cheap shot" at people who write pro/anti-Bush rants? Is it at the people who rank the content according only to their preexisting biases? Is it the popularly held opinions themselves? Is it Mr Bush?

All of them? None of them? I have no idea. There is no clue to be found either in the excerpt or your comment.

You are seeing things which are not there.

That is just the 23 wards at the centre. The population of Greater Tokyo, which is what most people refer to when they say "Tokyo", is more like 35 million.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Tokyo_Area

While I would agree that having the AIS but no Space Agency does indeed make our priorities look somewhat backwards, I have no ill will whatsoever towards the AIS - in fact I think it should be expanded. Obesity and diabetes are becoming major health problems in our society and we need to get them down.

I would argue that the AIS does a wonderful job promoting sport and exercise in the community, and also provides a regular crop of "heroes" to inspire the kids. If anything it should be bigger, more swimming pools, more ovals, more participation. It probably pays for itself many times over in future health care cost reduction.

It's not an either/or proposition. A Space Agency would be great, but the AIS is also good. We need both.

I could not agree more that AU should establish and fund (well!) a proper space agency. I would fucking LOVE that. Perhaps we could start by redirecting all allocated funding for that ridiculous internet filtering scheme.

But let's keep it in perspective. Australia has 21 million people. We're two thirds the population of California. The other city I spend a lot of time in, Tokyo, has more people than my whole god damn country. I think visitors and foreigners often get a mistaken impression about this country - sure, the cities are fairly large, but there's only fucking FIVE of them. It's a big country - I was born in South Australia, we have a military base there that is BIGGER THAN ENGLAND - but there's no people and kangaroos don't pay tax. Yet.

We're rich enough per capita, sure, but the volume just isn't there. For fuck's sake, we're closing down the entire Navy for 2 months for Christmas. We can't get enough people to staff our fricking marine defences (the most important, since we're an island) - but we're going to build a space industry now? With who?

What I would really like to see is some kind of cooperative effort. Why all this competition between nations, duplicated effort, and misplaced nationalism? We'd get so much more done if we pooled our resources and really worked together. And I don't mean in the manner of sclerotic, ineffective jaw-fests like the UN, I mean cooperate like allies in a war, which we're all pretty good at.

We need a war, then. A War on Not Being In Space! Come on, you apes! Do you want to live forever?

You're a Brit, so maybe you don't know about tipping.

In many countries in the world, a tip of around 20% for service is considered normal, even obligatory. In theory, if service is indeed not "up to your standards", you can leave nothing at all. In practise, almost everyone tips at or near the generally accepted level.

People could use your "pathetic excuse" to never tip, but they almost always do. Hell, I'm not even a yank, so I've got another excuse not to tip - "that's not my culture!". But in America, I always tip, 20% on the dot. Social pressure wins every time. So I bet that even if paying for restaurant meals was "optional", you'd still pay, unless you're some kind of sociopath who isn't capable of noticing or caring that people hate them.

I have had access to pretty much any music I want for free since 1998. I still seem to have a lot of CDs. Basically any band that makes it into my "A-list", I go buy all their CDs. Why? I don't know. There's no economic advantage. A pride thing, a social pressure thing, a status thing? You tell me.

I've had a DVD burner since the early 2000s. There has been nothing stopping me burning my own copies of DVDs, for a marginal or zero cost, since then. I have actually never done this even once. Why? Same as above, I guess? And I don't want to look like a cheap-ass loser to my friends. Or myself.

Why am I mentioning these things? Well, I just think your worldview is too black and white. There is not a sharp line between good paying customers and illegal thieving pirates. It's more like a gradient. Plenty of artists where I only have their "good" CD. I've got the rest of the albums on mp3, they're just not worth spending the $30 on (or, these days, storing the damn things forevermore - almost more of a factor!).

Similarly, I own a number of, say, iD software games. There were some shitty ones, and I never bought them. They just didn't deserve that vote. But I'll pay money for games I like, no problem at all. I'll pay a LOT of money for games I actually want. In fact I've previously said on this site that I'd pay pretty much any reasonable amount for remakes of some of my favourite games, say Marathon 2 or Final Fantasy 7. If there was a PS3 with FF7v2 in ROM and useless for anything else that costs $1000 and that was the only way to get it ... I would buy that in a heartbeat, lol.

So it's complex. Your worldview seems to be about a binary world of "filthy thieving callous dishonest pirates" vs "angels who can do no wrong". In reality, everyone I know is a mixture of the two.

Which am I, angel or thief? I own many more CDs than average. But I've "stolen" many more times than that again. I probably own 10 times as many games as the average consumer. But I've pirated 100 times more. But I've given the industry thousands of dollars! But I've stolen many times more! Which is it?

Grey. It's a word, it's an area, it's a colour, it's a point on a sliding scale between black and white. Turn up the bit depth on your display of the world, maybe you'll start to see an awful lot of it.