Humodour

So how's the Big Brother internet surveillance system and banning all drugs going for you Swedes? Anyway, there are games which deserve to be banned just like there are films that deserve to be banned. I wouldn't want a film glorifying murdering police to be released anymore than I would a game about the same. Democracy doesn't mean "anything goes" - that's anarchy. The censorship bodies were created by our democratically elected governments. And while this isn't perfect, it typically does lead to refinement over time to keep up with cultural and societal trends. For example, half the stuff on TV today would've been so taboo 50 or 60 years ago, and banned accordingly.

I gotta be honest, though: I'm surprised Japan banned it. We're talking about the same country that creates stuff like Bondage Fairies.

Nope, Australia definitely isn't. But that's a silly way to explain why the game is banned in China based on totalitarism. Germany and Japan definitely are not a totalitarian nations. I wasn't explaining why the game was banned in China, I was explaining why it isn't banned in Australia. You take any one thing banned in China and you could likely let it pass. The thing is that lots and lots of things are banned in China. WILL was implying Australia is quick to censor things, like China. Admittedly a tenuous analogy on my part, but poignant nonetheless.

Why would Australia ban it? We aren't some totalitarian regime like China. The only time we ban something is when enough soccer mums complain, which is usually not about violence, but gangs, drug use, prostitution, murdering civilians or psychopathic murder sprees. Even then lots of things get through - the original Fallouts, Fallout: Tactics, Half-Life, various versions of GTA, etc. As a survival horror game, this probably won't even get a mention in the media.

I'm pretty certain that the majority of the user stats and unique ID stuff is opt-in rather than opt-out (but I'm going from memory since I run Linux Ubuntu here). I'll check again on monday. Me, personally, I'm more concerned about my government than Google. Just look at the way America, Sweden, Britain (and now France) treat people's privacy and rights. At least Google adheres to Safe Harbour. But can you really ask your government not to put you on its secret list?

Yes, that's generally what the knee-jerk conservatives foresee whenever the Democrats come along to clean up their mess. Meanwhile the rest of the world cheers.

When Obama wins you have no idea how heroically drunk I am going to get.

Phew. I tend to associate libertarian with extremist economic conservatives because that's what the majority I've met are.

Let's play some Freudian word association: 1) universal welfare 2) universal healthcare 3) government regulation 4) free market capitalism 5) social democracy

So they've rephrased it then. Rephrase? They've completely inverted it's meaning. Before it was part of a generic EULA that said, basically, "All content sent belongs to Google". Now it says "All content sent belongs to you." The original wording was an accident. "Also, user statistics are sent, unless one deactivates it with some option." That's wrong. I don't know if it's your translation or what, but user stats are not sent to Google unless you opt in (turn it on). "Urls or queries entered into the address bar are sent to google." They are sent to whatever your default search engine is, and this can be easily turned off. "Each browser gets a unique id upon installation." A cookie (unsure if it's stored as typical web cookie) used to help with debugging on Google's end. Even then, it's only used when installing or updating, unless you opt-in to sending user stats to Google. It's not a tracking cookie. http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/privacy.html Your concerns are valid, don't get me wrong. I just feel they're misplaced about Google. *shrug*

Uh... That's exactly what a banned book is. I'm not aware of the government ever banning a book from being made or sold, outside of copyright infringements and other such technicalitites. When we talk about "banned books" we generally mean either books that are disallowed from distribution in public libraries, or books that aren't allowed to be disseminated or taught in a classroom setting, usually because they contain godless faggotry or curse words or other such (socialist and unamerican) things that harm our children. This sort of "nannying" is exactly the sort of thing civil libertarians rail against, but it's interesting that when Palin endorses such action it's alright and even commendable. That her constituents want books banned is immaterial. Libertarians are supposed to get their panties all twisted over tyranny of the majority in any case, if a majority really wants books banned. Hah, libertarians would want public libraries shut down and let people buy the damn book in a bookstore. That's why nobody (outside of America) really respects libertarians.

What terms of usage? You mean these ones? "You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services." Google update isn't spyware. I get that some people are paranoid about Google, but please, at least get your facts right before you start the conspiracy theories. Google update is exactly that - an updater. Firefox has a very similar mechanism. It is not secretly tracking your downloads and usage habits. There are ways to tell, and it has definitely been checked. There are features of Chrome which Google could potentially abuse (but which we so far have zero reason to suspect they are). Features which also exist in Firefox and IE8. If you're one of those people who are overly paranoid about Google, just wait for the inevitable open source fork off its code (Chromium).

only american can talk like this enjoy your AIDS while Canada and Europe facepalms at your healthcare system Hey, don't forget Australia. We also enjoy a good round of mocking America's shocking healthcare and welfare systems.

If you actually read the report it states over and over again that the abstinence-only program is not less effective than other programs. It also states that it has a possible short-term impact but that the numbers even out at the end of 6 years. So that leaves open the possibility that abstinence-only programs could reduce pre high school sex and perhaps thus pre high school pregnancies. They even out by the end of 6 years and equal numbers used protection in both groups, likely because in high school every kid has a separate health class to supplement the abstinence only indoctrination they received earlier. Your attack on abstinence-only programs = epic fail. Also, regardless of Sarah Palin's beliefs, the abstinence-only funding is a federal program, and despite that, you have no clue what they were teaching in her children's school. Also, Bristol's boyfriend's myspace page hadn't been updated in over a year, and I don't know how many high school guys will actually admit to wanting children on those stupid myspace surveys. I doubt he was vocal about not wanting kids; I assume he simply filled out the survey. And oh no he's a self-described redneck! Rednecks are the bane of America! He probably hates all the black people in Alaska! Yes, obviously it was probably an accident. Unless Bristol Palin was very eager to get married and used a pregnancy to force her parents to allow it. And since this sort of things happens in college towns all the time, it's apparent that educated young adults get pregnant on accident, many of them having done so while using contraception. So you don't have substantial proof that they didn't use contraception so it's not relevant to anything. What's the difference between a bad choice and a mistake? A teenage girl got pregnant. She fortunately happens to have a supportive family. When teenage girls become single moms and then the kids become single moms and then their kids become single moms and their sons grow up without male role models and they have no one willing to help them out and they become a drain on the American taxpayers or end up in America's prisons then that's a social problem. When a teenage girls gets pregnant and the families take care of the matter then it's a family problem. There were a lot of teen pregnancies in my rural town back when I was in high school, and we had sex ed in health class in junior high and again our freshman year of high school. A lot of teenage girls, with the help of their families, raised their children and stayed in school and it wasn't a big deal to anybody. And many other girls had abortions that no one knew about, one girl claiming to have had about 20 by the time she was 18. Of course you also think that the marriage is some idea of the parents rather than the children, and that that's "in true conservative fashion." Getting married before you turn 20 is just so unhip! Though I thought it was last year when Sarah Palin kept her daughter out of school and faked her own pregnancy and lied to everyone that that was in true conservative fashion. Get over it; it's a non-issue and the uncertainties and logical fallacies make it impossible to use in an argument. So trying to use it as an argument or speculating that they'll get divorced is simply being an ass. As much evidence as people supposedly have that Sarah Palin is a social conservative, I'd like to see some evidence that she actually governed like one. Dude, just calm down. You need to smoke a joint or have sex or something.

He does have a point, though: Palin's daughter is irrelevant to the politics of this. To think otherwise is to let inconsequential trivialities overshadow the more disturbing plans and stances of McCain and Palin.

Abstinence-only sex education leads to the opposite of the intended results by spreading ignorance regarding sexually transmitted diseases and the proper use of contraceptives to prevent both infections and pregnancy. Hmm, I guess it's the whole bat**** crazy religious conservative thing that gets me down a bit. Don't worry about me, though - I'll cheer up.

Gorth: Ah, ok. I have no clue what MSDN in is, it just sounded like you were attributing the sandbox concept to it, sorry. That's kind of funny, though - sandboxing a sandbox. mkreku: Chrome is slow for you? Excluding Javascript, Chrome, Opera, and Firefox execute so fast that any difference is typically imperceptible. Except most sites use lots of Javascript, so Chrome loads much faster (and, importantly, is far more responsive once loaded). Theory aside, that's also been what myself and others have found in practice. Especially for things like Slashdot, Facebook, Gmail - anything which uses a moderate amount of JS (DOM, AJAX, etc). Unless you mean because adblock turns off scripts or images or something (I haven't used it). In that respect, plugins are still the main advantage of Firefox. Architect: I, uh... cool!

What does a sandbox have to do with MSDN? http://www.sandboxie.com/

Bloodlines had one of the most fun combat systems I've seen in a game for a long time. Also fun were: Icewind Dale 1, Deus Ex 1, Half-Life 1, Planescape: Torment, Jagged Alliance 2.

Oh yes, especially Wikipedia is bad... For somebody as notoriously curious as me, that place is like a monkey trap. The number of tabs grows exponentially and I can't let go. Darn history pages...

I do it all the time, and I know for a fact I'm not the only one. It's very easy to do on news sites, Wikipedia, a Google search, etc. On the other hand, my autistic friend hates tabs, and even modified Firefox's code to remove them.

... Until you get to 30 or 40 tabs open and Firefox starts crawling. Opera is also faster than Firefox when it comes to large numbers of tabs I've found. Firefox doesn't out perform it in memory usage over time - junk builds up, though it's superior to IE. In Chrome, once you kill a tab, you kill its memory, so there's no leakage or anything. I imagine the flat-rate toll on memory for each process open would make Firefox the victor for sessions of short duration and an average number of tabs like you say. Opera puts the tabs at the top, too. I like it - makes sense in that the URL is specific to each tab. Once Google releases some plugin and theme support I'm sure you'll be able to move it. I'm personally waiting for a status bar at the bottom. I haven't been able to see how Firefox could be faster than Chrome? The only aspect where there's any sufficiently noticeable speed difference is Javascript, where Chrome opens a can of whoop-ass. Javascript is, 95% of the time, the reason my Firefox is running slowly. The sandboxing and the massive Javascript speed up are each important enough on their own to warrant seriously considering switching. But yeah, it's all good - Firefox will change to keep up. Yay for competition. Personally, I hope the majority of Firefox users stick to Firefox (TraceMonkey should provide Javascript speeds as fast a Chrome). Chrome is an IE replacement so that we can finally be rid of that piece of bloatware (i.e. it falls below 50% to 60% market share and the usage of other browsers snowballs from there, allowing web apps to snowball in turn). I personally like Chrome because it is minimalist, fast, efficient and very secure. The reason I switched to Firefox in the first place was because Mozilla had too many features. Now Firefox has become Mozilla.

I recently was able to test Chrome out on a lab computer at college. To put it simply: it's amazing. It far exceeded all my expectations. It is, basically, the fastest, most stable, most secure, and least memory intensive web browser out there. Its Javascript performance is astounding (keep in mind almost every site uses JS, often to a large degree). Gmail and Google apps, just to name names, are blindly fast and responsive under Chrome. And unlike other browsers it doesn't die at 30 tabs open, and when malware installs or a page dies, it's sandboxed, so it doesn't take down your entire browser or system. It's a beta, and some features aren't implemented yet (basically the only thing missing is plugin support - including adblock, but I don't use either of those), yet it's a sleek, fast, thoroughly usable browser. Once it comes out for Ubuntu I'll hop on board. My suggestion is: anybody who is still using Internet Explorer, just switch to Chrome. There's absolutely nothing IE7 or IE8 does better. Chrome even has Opera's SpeedDial! Note: there was some confusion about a rather restrictive EULA inherited from some other Google utility. That was fixed pretty quickly: it basically now reads "anything you do on Chrome is none of our business and we don't own any of your data". Download location: http://www.google.com/chrome

This madhatter guy is hilarious but he also makes me sad because a lot of Americans think like that.

I have an idea, why don't you elect McSame.