Why would anyone mark the parent 'Flamebait'? He's certainly making a valid point.

The Wall Street Journal referred to him yesterday as the "mastermind" behind the "notorious" Pirate Bay, which was an amusing use of language. Or alarming.

Virtually every major art movement of the twentieth century (and the present century) can be traced in a straight line back to Picasso in some phase. His importance has far less to do with whether or not you "like" him than it does with the incredible fecundity of his ideas and his perceptual acuity -- and what they gave birth to. Not to engage in artspeak, but it's true.

It's strange to be on a site where so many discussions take place at a satisfying level of understanding and yet find opinions about art that I would expect from the mouth of my 83-year-old aunt, sitting in her room full of doggie pictures and sunset seascapes.

Sorry to tell you Jane Q. Public, but you're full of shit. Anyone who has lived in both Europe and the United States for extended periods of time (I've lived 20 years in each) will tell you that the US crime problem is IMMENSE compared to Europe. Violent crime in America is not restricted to the big city. I lived in US cities from Podunk, Nebraska to several large cities in the East. Americans feel threatened by crime in each and every one of them. In Europe, when crimes do occur, they really are almost exclusively between various breeds of mafiosi. There are no serial rapists haunting the suburbs, ordinary people do not feel compelled to pack a firearm in self-defense (something you'll find is the case in virtually every small American city in the West, justified or not), there is no danger in any city – even the large ones – walking home from a theater or bar at three in the morning or getting on the Metro. University professors do not shoot fellow faculty members in the head at faculty meetings. School shootings have occurred in two countries, Finland and Germany, the first of which is unusual in Europe in that its gun laws pretty much mirror America's. But the scope of these phenomena is extremely restricted compared to the copycatting that has gone on in America. So don't be so quick to pat yourself on the back. You don't deserve it. America is a culture of violence, plain and simple.

Absolutely right. I'm a translator. Google Translate can now be set to feed into memoQ, SDL Trados and probably other CAT software automatically. I don't know what the terms of service are on Google Translate but perhaps the 'abuse' they're talking about is partially related to the several hundred times per day that I and many other Trados and memoQ users hit the site via the API for a translation. The irony is, I blow the Google translation out without even reading it about 90% of the time. But since Trados grabs it automatically for every translation unit (read: every sentence), it adds up to a lot of hits.

It might have behooved SDL Trados and the others to make getting a Google translation optional for every unit -- i.e., no translation from Google if you don't press a key. That way, you'd only make use of Google when you really needed to, instead of using it en masse for the entire document.

In any event, I think this'll have a real impact for translators who've gotten used to using it. Trusting a (free) external source for the tools you need to work probably isn't wise.

...that one day, all God's androids will join hands and sing, in the words of the old Nokia spiritual, "Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, we're free at last!"

I'm used to PR people spray painting happy faces all over everything, but this is some of the gaggiest PR barf I've had spilled in my path.

If the number of particles available to create structure is constrained over given volumes of space (and it is), an infinite universe would indeed contain copies, since the same combinations would necessarily reoccur. In fact, there would be an infinite number of copies. Even a very large universe (one whose size exhausts the number of possible combinations of the building blocks) would contain some copies. No experimental proof needed in this case: it's provable mathematically.

Sorry, but in this particular instance, rightly or wrongly, I think "you're judged by the company you keep." Obama is too close to the entertainment industry.

With regard to a lawyer's job being to vigorously defend his or her client -- lawyers take this almost on the level of the doctors' Hippocratic Oath, don't they? While I grant you that every client has the right for their case to be put forth with vigor, there's still a grey area here -- a danger that the lawyer's willingness to work for any client will wind him up in the same ethical boat as a "have gun, will travel" marketing fuck.

He means: "The fact that publishers electing not to take part in the voluntary controls remained unknown to the comic-buying public probably indicates the controls had some effect, i.e., that publishers not taking part weren't able to achieve commercial viability."