Humodour

I use my face, generally.

I can't tell if Krezack is calling me a moron or not... Of course not. I'm just a fan of xkcd. Walsingham: Yes. You'd be surprised how many phones I've bought that ship with every ringtone but a ringing sound. Most of them are downright embarrassing. Which brings me onto idiots who have Avril Lavigne or something as their ringtone only to turn bright scarlet when their phone rings in public.

Like it matters: Lukashenko is corrupt as hell. He is an insane, semi-benign dictator.

Well, it's only one fifth. And yeah, that's stupid, you need only look at Turkey - a 98% Muslim country - to see how strongly they oppose Islamic fundamentalists. They sent their forces into Iraq with us for heck's sake... whatever good Iraq did. I do think that banking tidbit is far stupider due to its sheer vacuousness, though.

I found this interesting. Long-time Republicans question McCain's experience in choosing Pailin. http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na...0,3440078.story It didn't occur to me before, but now that they mention it, she does tend to govern just like Bush.

Also. http://xkcd.com/481/

HD-DVD lost the battle, so all the major studios are shifting to Blu-Ray. Blu-Ray is a pretty safe bet for the future, I'd say. It's just a matter of time. HDTV's get cheaper every day. Nah, both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD lost. Blu-Ray is seeing poor sales in stores even though it supposedly 'won' the format war. They're trying to do gimmicks like sell Blu-Ray discs with magazines. Maybe they should be packing Blu-Ray players with the mags instead. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/23/0051212 http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/04/1656212 http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article....8/08/07/1811259 It's not like Blu-Ray and HD-DVD were the best choice anyway. There are formats that run the whole gamut up to terabyte capacity discs. It's all a matter of quality, size, cost, and luck. Turns out the good old normal definition DVDs have the winning combination on that front.

I'm just worried that when McCain has a heart attack it'll be Palin who takes over. Does anybody want that? Really?

That's awesome. Anyway, he had every right to a snide '**** yeah' expression here and there when he put McCain in his place. McCain was trying so very desperately to misrepresent him.

Okay, I was just confused because you seemed to be responding to me. On the off chance you meant to quote my first post in this thread instead, I was referring to after-effects of Wall street on banks in Brazil and Australia: both weathered it without much hassle, and having not heard much fuss from the rest of the world, comparatively, I'm assuming they did too - that's why I asked Steve how Britain was handling it. Still, Australia and Brazil - the two economies I've been following lately - do have very diversified trade relations and better regulated banks, so I could be seeing things from a perspective less indicative of the world at large. I'd be interested to hear how Europe's banks are doing. Mostly all I can find on that is vague panic and hype. http://business.smh.com.au/business/us-eco...80924-4mun.html http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5d19bae8-8a9a-11...00779fd18c.html

It's rather amusing, isn't it? No, it's not amusing at all. Because, as things are, if the markets crash as badly as they've been predicting, everyone's gonna feel it - even us EuroCommies. Don't expect it to happen overnight, though. Uh, sorry? We were talking about the 'socialist takeover' conspiracy which taks elucidated.

But what have we seen, really? Tempting as it may be to blame all the evils in the world on dubya, it just doesn't work that way. Guard Dog wrote a very interesting and readable timeline of the events that led to the present crisis. You are content to repeat these boring canned slogans over and over. If it's SO obvious, why not explain it to the rest of us? As important as the economy is right now, it is not everything. Bush's poor record doesn't stop at the economy - it touches on things as disparate as scientific funding, civil rights, upsetting the bipartisan balance of the DoJ and Supreme Court, encouraging Creationism in science class, and a significantly falling standard of education in schools overall. I think it's very important to acknowledge Bush's track record. It puts the fact that McCain agrees with Bush most of the time into perspective. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/...gree-with-bush/

I will say McCain is better than your average Republican, but he is clearly still a staunch Republican on too many important issues, and we've seen what 8 years of that lead to. From what I can tell the format of the debate wasn't overly new - although they did stream it live to the Internet for the first time ever. The moderator, for his part, did try time and time again to involve and challenge McCain and Obama, but they didn't seem too interested. You could, at most, credit McCain with a tie. Which essentially means a win for Obama, since he's the one with the momentum to begin with. McCain needed a clear victory. I was amazed at how level-headed and presidential Obama was, even if he didn't make the debate particularly 'entertaining'. For his part, McCain seemed rather flustered and snarky.

OK, I'll bite. What's first?

^ Might want to check the viability of Blu-Ray, first. It seems to be going the way of Betamax in a market that says "enough is enough: normal DVDs are fine". Of course, if you don't care about compatibility for the future, then there's nothing inherently wrong with either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Although now that you mention Galaxy Quest, I think it's time I dug it up again for a good laugh.

Time has a good assessment of the debate: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/...1845106,00.html

It's rather amusing, isn't it?

what's that blow-hard got to do with anything? obama's voting record (and his general positions) is all that matters. you ideologists just don't get anything that involves facts, do you? taks That's rich coming from one of the most ideological people on these forums. Your ungrounded faith in the invisible hand of the free market is downright frightening.

Really? A quick poll of 500 undecided voters found that 40% thought Obama won, while 25% thought McCain won. They thought Obama knocked him out on the economy and stood his ground well on foreign relations, as you say. So I'd hold off on your predictions for now.

how does circumvented DRM == encouraging piracy? Ummm where do you think people get the DRM cracks from? 'Piracy' groups. That means so-called pirates are giving ordinary people what they want, and in doing so establishing a higher level of legitimacy and penetration. It's not at all clear that DRM has any impact on levels of piracy; it's simply that the standard industry assumption is that DRM stops piracy, fingers crossed. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to discover it's the opposite.

So how much are they paying you, taks?

America is actually one of the few Western countries which is yet to adopt universal welfare and healthcare.

Just for the record, because the title could be slightly misleading: the LHC has nothing what so ever to do with the state of the global economy. BTW, is the UK really in trouble due to America? I thought everywhere was riding along without much hassle except America? I know Australia and Brazil are doing fine.

Republican presidential nominee Mike Huckabee says suspending the debates was a "huge mistake".

But when you become uncompromisingly ideological like the communists, conservatives and libertarians do, you lose sight of the reality of society and the market, and that's not helpful at all.