Didn't read the article but basically it is the same as taking a loan from a bank. You have to give some of your future earnings to someone else.

I have great memories of the game. Would have last played it in 1991 though when I was still a pre-teen. What I remember appealing to me was that there were lots of hidden places to go and items to get (it was coins right ? diamonds as well, I think different sizes if them?), and you could break stuff by jumping on it with your cane. The hidden areas were easy enough that I could find them without trouble as a young kid, but there were enough of them that you were always finding more stuff and it made the game appealing to come back to.

Black is associated with evil because it is black out at night. It has nothing to do with skin color.

It bothers me a bit to see you propose the idea of asking people to pay what is reasonable, and then calling them freeloaders if they don't pay. Maybe it actually wasn't worth anything to them. In the case of the submitter, the application was something to do with graphic design. It's easy to imagine someone downloading a copy of this program if it were offered "by donation", playing with it for a bit, and abandoning it never having used it for any real commercial or hobby purpose. It is worth nothing to them, like much of the internet, they had a look at it because it was there.

If you walk by a street performer and don't pay them, are you a freeloader? What if you look at them for a minute and walk on? I would say no, you might look at them because they were there, but you didn't ask them to come there.

Asking people to pay what they want is a lot like being a street performer. You are offering something, but essentially appealing to people's sense of charity to try and get paid, rather than providing goods or services in exchange for money. It devalues the work you are doing (necessarily because people can legally get what you are offering for free) and it's hard to see this as a viable business model in most cases

Forgive me if this has already been mentioned, but wouldn't it be cool to make a Infra-red led array that shines brightly on your face or away from your head in a way that saturates the photosensors in a camera and makes it impossible to see your face in an image / recording? I am going to try to make one of these I think.

Just in case anybody is reading the above, it is partisan drivel and a great example of the american style politics in which we are now immersed.

This is what I came here to see or post. I like to read spy novels from the 60s-80s. Within the last year I read one (no idea now which one now, maybe something by Frederick Forsyth) with this used as a plot device. Something about operators trained to purposefully change from their usual rhythm to indicate duress I think.

There was a telescreen behind a picture in the 'hideout' room he rented above the prole shop. He had thought he was not being monitored there; it turned out he was being monitored, but my take on it was that this was just for sound because the picture blocked the telescreen's camera. Of course as you say, there were various people on to him the whole time, and the prole from whom he was renting the shop, Mr. Chillington (or something like that) was actually a thought police agent.

I have read 1984 a number of times and didn't find anything incongruous with the book in your original post

Just want to say that I think the playbook UI is garbage too. There are few specific comments I have, any maybe all tablets are like it, but it just feels awkward and poorly tested to me. I am always accidentally closing applications, fighting with the autocorrect / word chooser or whatever its called, constantly switching between keyboard layouts to enter data, can't get the cursor into the correct position when typing in text fields, etc. Everything feels like a fight with the machine. Another example, maybe I'm doing something wrong, but when entering a url in the the browser, slashdot.org, it will never suggest the top level site but instead will give me three choices like http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/13/01/29/1944232/rims-bb10-campaign-requires-some-serious-work, in the address bar. This ensures I have to type the whole domain name every time.

I got the playbook as part of the developer challenge when it first came out and was really excited about it. I have been consistently disappointed with it (remember how version 2 of the software was going to make it so much greater, then it was delayed for months and finally did almost nothing). Right now it is collecting dust somewhere

It's OK to ask (although you probably could have looked it up) and I understand that younger people might not know this, but it's pretty sad to me that his has been modded up. I think it says something about the way the userbase of slashdot has changed.

I believe it. And I don't care. I would also not be surprised that a higher percentage of male athletes use steroids. Cheating is an unfortunate byproduct of being competitive (although maybe an evolutionarily advantageous one).

It does piss me off though to see garbage like

in the summary.

I agree with what you say about raising tax

But complaining about having to be frugal while you go to school. Really?

You are making an investment. Of course you should have to pay for it. You already spend four years of your life not working and going to school, presumably so you could get a better paying job, now you are doing it again. Under a government funded loan system, you were able to borrow money to make an investment. Another government program is giving you free food. You have nothing to complain about.

Someone please mod this funny.

I often joke that if I ever have to apply for a (non-academic) job, my chances will be better if I just put 'prison' for the four years I was doing my Ph.D. in order to explain the time gap.

There's not much chance of gravity pulling something into us in that way. Think about how long it would take for a ball dropped a few hundred thousand km above the earth to fall to the ground. Any object moving fast enough that it has passed the earth by during that time will not be pulled into us.