A Government Accountability Office report on the actual costs of IP piracy -- undertaken because of the big intellectual property enforcement law Bush signed back in 2008 -- has gathered up all the data and subjected it to first real independent scrutiny and analysis, and has determined that just about every claim about the costs of piracy made by the big rightsholders and their organizations is grossly over-inflated, and in some cases outright fraudulent.  Article here.
As the article's author notes, it's a delightful irony that the law that big media and the BSA bought into existence to help keep their pockets lined has, as pretty much its first major action, dealt a death blow to their claims to billions of dollars of lost revenue.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

... action figures from Akira Kurosawa's Star Wars.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

If you've been in the gaming hobby for long enough (I'm talking at least a couple of decades, here), you probably remember at least hearing about the fantasy RPG with "no elves", Talislanta. Now, it's available for free. (What? Yes, legally.)

http://talislanta.com/]Talislanta | Still No Elves!

Oh, and there's an interview with the game's creator, Stephan Michael Sechi, http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=68722]over on the SJGames forums...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

So I was doing a little Recluse's Victory PVP with Cyberman 8. (Mainly going for the final Heavy Badge that C8 doesn't have yet.) And Shrike wanders in with Skyfox (Empathy/Energy Defender).
So I get buffed with Fortitude and other nice things big time. Go out and dismantle a VEAT, with the Stalker playing backup for him TOTALLY unable to land anything on me (IIRC my DEF was around 60-70 at that point with the buffs) and me able to ignore him until I'd taken down the VEAT.
I go back for another set of buffs (thanks Shrike!) and go back out again, this time popping Elude, just to make things even more unbalanced. This time there's that same stalker - named "Killa Ninja" - out there that I can see plain as day thanks to perception buffs. Go over there and pop Cobra Strike on him for the stun, follow up with Eagle's Claw to stun him some more, and from there just CURB STOMP him in about 10-12 secs flat.
Oh - the subject line? I'd just seen Speed Racer on cable a few hours before, and the line from Pops Racer came to mind, and I hit "broadcast" and said (quoted),
"More like a NONJa. Terrible what passes for a Ninja these days!"
(Hee - yes, I'm a bad bad monkey sometimes. )

...and we may have discovered it by accident.  An article from New Scientist that just might blow your mind.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

An odd little webtoy/grafitti wall kind of thing.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

The advertisement for "Aciphex", as far as I could tell once I stopped giggling a medicine for acid reflux, had me composing this mental memo:

Marketing Dept.,


You're all fired.  And whoever the genius was who green-lit the trade name "aciphex" is double-fired, and I'll be telling everyone in the industry that he's the moron who came up with "Ass Effects".


Sincerely,
The Boss

--sofaspud
--"Listening to your kid is the audio equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting, Spud." --OpMegs

Who thought that *Vivid* would be the first manga to wind up labeled NSFW among the Nanoha family?
Misato: More fanservice!
---
"Oh, silver blade, forged in the depths of the beyond. Heed my summons and purge those who stand in my way. Lay
waste."

Wakfu!
Why didn't anyone tell me about this before now?
Seriously.
This stuff is awesome!
--------------
Epsilon

The second of my thoughts this week:

How well do the Charity organisations do in a World with the 'Wave? What with Medical Ultratech, the various medical research funds would be in a tissy. Disaster relief would probably be much easier, with portable and powerful rescue equipment and sensors.

The ones I'm most uncertain about are the various 'Wish granting' groups for disabled and terminally ill people. Surely the benifits of 'Wavetech would cause something of a schism in public thinking. On the one hand, 'Wavetech and biomoding could eliminate the need for them (if, of course, the 'Danes get over the knee jerk 'Wave scare). On the other hand, some of the requests could get really outlandish (Visit the South Pole? Easy! Have a tropical holiday there... Slightly more tricky.)

Thoughts?