Enoch

It depends of the jurisdiction's law with regard to accessory culpability. The article you link is about a suit in Sweden, and I have no idea what their legal system is like. But, in the anglo-american tradition, a party can be liable for a crime if it intentionally, meaningfully assisted in what it knows to be criminal activity. (The inclusion of the word "pirate" in the site's name should take care of the "knowingly" element of the crime.) So, while Google provides general search services, without regard for whether you're looking for Beach Boys song lyrics or neo-nazi kiddie porn, pirate sites are specifically set up to help people whose intent is to violate copyright laws (which are internationally protected by various treaties). It's a pretty easy legal distinction to make (although BitTorrent is a closer question-- it comes down to intent).

This might be the gin talking, but, damn, I make some good stew. Although I must give credit to Mark Bittman, whose fantasticly well-written cookbook provided the basis for my dinner. I love the touch he recommends of adding a bit of garlic and cup of thawed frozen peas to the stew 5 mins before turning off the heat.

Made a beef stew and a Martini (Bombay Sapphire, 4:1 gin-to-vermouth, one olive that my wife will eat when I'm done). The former is simmering, and I'm halfway through the latter.

If nobody else did, Mark Twain clearly foresaw the threat of future beyond-the-grave activities by Ms. Austen. Two illustrative quotes : "Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig [Jane Austen] up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone." "Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death." (Source)

Very tiny people? I posted a pic over in the screenshots thread at that resolution. The characters are a pretty good size, about equivalent to playing NWN2 zoomed out as far as it goes. And it really gives you a better appreciation for all the lovely background art. Anyhow, I'm going through the worst part of the game now-- the Curst caverns/prison. It's been a long time since I've played an IE game, and I had forgotten how useful (essential, even) "pull" tactics were, especially when combined with a stealthed thief waiting to backstab the opponent when they get to your fighter wall. The tedium of re-setting the line, stealthing Annah, sending Morte out to draw another Guard or two, killing, looting, and repeating over and over again makes me wonder how I ever got through Icewind Dale. I know the IWD controls were better and all (PS:T radial menu is teh suck), but it's still rather mind-numbing.

In what way? Is it a general terminology issue, or are the more complex concepts difficult to grasp? I linked a few good articles in this post. They're pretty reader-friendly.

Why don't more books and movies feature the main character murdering hundreds of people simply to improve his skills?

Multiple Choice = Professor/TA doesn't want to spend the time necessary to read and grade responses.

R.E.M. -- I Am Superman

It's always nice to see old friends re-united.

if i could travel into the future, i doubt i'd be depressed. That's because you haven't seen the future.

Well, we're just using the system we inherited from some crazy Englishmen. Although the 6th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives criminal defendants an absolute right to a jury trial, the 7th Amendment only says that the right to a jury in civil cases "shall be preserved." This is generally read as meaning that the rules that were in place under English law in the Colonial period must remain in place. (Vis., you can demand a jury for cases at law (involving money damages), but not for cases at equity (demanding some other remedy).) Ultimately, the founders of the U.S. system saw jury trial as an insulation against tyranny-- judges were historically tied to the Crown, so juries were put in place to limit that potential for centralized power.

I would respond to sluggo's post, but his signature is creeping me out. I'm no great defender of jury systems, anyway. Much like Churchill's famous quip on democracy, the best argument against a jury system is a five-minute conversation with the average juror (or, in Eddo's case, a 20-second conversation ). I guess I can see some rationale for criminal juries. But the State really has no real reason to be involved at all in most civil cases (particularly the huge ones between sophisticated parties that tend to occupy most of the courts' time), let alone bothering private citizens to come in and collaboratively mediate these private disputes. Sure, there have to be some public, peaceful means to resolve disputes in a binding manner, lest we risk encouraging vigilantism, but there is plenty of room to pare down access to courts in civil disputes without endangering this goal.

I'll grant that the theocratic leaders in Iran place tight restrictions on the operations of the elected government. But you must remember that those theocrats began as a populist, democratic movement, overthrowing the country's existing monarchy. (Hamas' success in the Palestinian elections would also be an apt analogy.) My point was simply that the existence of elections is no guarantee that the people won't vote theocrats into office, oppress dissenting views, and take a bellicose attitude toward their neighbors and the rest of the world. In many ways, I think that whoever won this election in the states was probably doomed from the start. As a nation, we're finally paying for what has been, if you will, a "sub-prime" generation of financial and governmental elites. Obama and the Dems in congress will react in pretty much the only way they can, which is only marginally different from what GOP leadership would do in this circumstance. (They'll make a big deal about some limitations on executives taking government assistance, and direct a little more of it towards things like loan modification for individuals, but on the whole, 90% of the policy is going to be the same as what Bush and Paulson would've done had they stayed on.) Will it be enough to make a difference? Nobody knows, but even if it does, it might take too long to do so and end up dooming the political careers of those involved.

It was a big part of it. If you've got an hour or so to burn, here's the first part of the WaPo's 3-part series on the events leading up to AIG's collapse: The Beautiful Machine

He's not THAT bad, surely? Welcome to the consequences of 20 years of predominantly negative political campaigns! Both parties have long known that the most effective way to get people likely to support them to the polls is to scare them into thinking that, if the other candidate wins, all hell will break loose and it will be the end of America as we know it. There used to be a noticeable backlash that would prevent campaigns from being "too mean." But, beginning with Bush Sr.'s campaign in 1988, national parties (and their interest group proxies) have been a lot less shy about going to the scare tactics. Compound that over a generation, along with 1) the fact that party identification in America tends to run along cultural and regional lines (such that in many communities, people rarely meet others with strongly differing political views), and 2) the internet and competing 24-hour cable news networks allowing people to choose the news source that challenges their predetermined ideology least, and you get an electorate that is deeply cynical and very eager to believe the worst about the people on "the other side." Anyhow, elections in Iraq are good things, but we're by no means out of the woods yet. Democracy is good, but time will tell which model Iraq ends up following: democratic, pluralist, mostly tolerant Turkey, or democratic, theocratic, bellicose, and intolerant Iran.

Fair point, especially when one considers that the core problems were being handled by only a small percentage of these firms' employees. Take AIG, for example-- their core insurance business (i.e., the vast majority of their employees) has been consistently profitable throughout this, but the management of their "Financial Products" subsidiary, which was trading in Credit Default Swaps, managed to take on enough bad risk (trusting computer modeling that never considered the possibility of lots of firms/investments/loans going bad all at once) to swamp the rest of the company and force the Fed to buy up 80% of it. As to Mesh's point, I'd mark the key point as Salomon Brothers going public in 1986, which set off a chain reaction of all the other big financial firms having their own IPOs so that they could keep up. Prior to that point, all the Wall Street firms were partnerships, mostly doing fee-based work for clients, but also doing some trading using the firm's own resources (i.e., the partners' money). When you switch from trading your bosses' money to trading with the money of thousands of anonymous shareholders, your tolerance for risk increases dramatically (especially when that risk is comfortably off in the future, well after you'll have cashed your annual bonus check). Plus, the premium you have to pay traders to keep them honest now extends upward to all your executives and the even the Board of Directors.

How the heck do you have 2400+ of any type of ammo fresh out of the Vault?

Today the wife and I ordered some curtains for the guest room. It currently has none, and her cousin is coming to visit in two weeks. Then I did some grocery shopping, had a cocktail, and cooked dinner. Made a London Broil, which, oddly enough, I think is an American thing-- it's a large steak (2 pounds or so), usually top round (which is an often tough and dry cut of meat), heavily marinaded (I used soy sauce, lime juice, garlic, Dijon mustard, olive oil, and black pepper), grilled, and cut into thin slices (against the grain to mitigate the toughness). I missed overshot the "medium rare" target by one increment, but it was still rather good. Now I'm just finishing up some ice cream while the wife chats on the phone with her mother.

Just got Torment up and running with Ghostdog's UI mod and all 3 of Qwinn's mods. It'll be the first time I've played the game in at least 5 years, probably more.

You absolutely need someone with good Hide/Move Silently skills to be your overland map leader. Apart from that, pure rogue is probably overkill (a multi-classed character or a Ranger or Monk works fine), but they are more useful than they were in the original campaign. Traps are more deadly than they were (but they're still not particularly common), and, much like in MotB, there are a few locks that are un-Knock-able.

Dude, it's called Google. A few easy points for quick & dirty estimation: -15C = 5F 0C = 32F (water freezes) 10C = 50F 28C = 82F (this one is probably the easiest to remember, and the most useful for daily air temp measurments) 40C = 104F 100C = 212F (water boils) For temps between those easy-to-remember points, each degree C is 9/5 as big as a degree F, which can be rounded up to 2 for ease of use. So, if someone says it's 32C outside, and you know that 28=82, you can estimate that at about 90F pretty easily (it's 89.6, to be exact). Footnote: Actual formula is Tf = (9/5)*Tc+32

Miles Davis Quintet -- Gingerbread Boy.

Rough morning. Played some hoops for a couple hours after work yesterday, and came home rather tired. Then there was a bit of an argument with the wife that kept us both up until around midnight. After prying myself out of bed, I discovered that it was almost painfully cold outside, mostly due to a biting wind, so the 3/4 mi. walk that begins my commute was awful. But then I got to the subway and switched my ipod to some Jimmy Smith. That helped brighten my mood immensely.

look up the definition of impeachment. it is the government analogy to indictment. Criminal procedure rights don't follow "analogies" (if they did, a corporate board meeting to discuss the dismissal of a CEO might well implicate them as well), they follow the 14th Amendment's "Life, Liberty, and Property." As pretty much every court has read these terms in the past, the right to continue in an elected office does not qualify under any of these 3 concepts. (But, as I mentioned a few days ago, the right to run for an elected office for which you meet the pre-defined qualifications almost certainly does quality as a 14th Amendment liberty, so I think Blags has a case with respect to the lifetime ban on Illinois public office.) Ultimately, yeah, the process does feel a little unfair, largely because there was nobody in the legislature who was sticking up for the Gov. But a slightly-unfair-seeming impeachment doesn't really bother me so much in that situation. If a Governor has zero support in the legislature, he's going to be the least effective governor imaginable, so it doesn't really bother me that there is a lower bar for tossing a Governor in that situation out of office. Consider it something like a vote of extreme no-confidence.