The war on internet advertising has gone nuclear. If you’re not using Mozilla Firefox with Adblock, you’re completely missing out, doubly so if you’re on dial-up. Both downloads are free. Get cracking, my peeps.

I have never been more ashamed of being an alumni of the University of Washington.

Special non-props to worthless little whore Jill Edwards, “student senator.”

This idiot
has his ass kicked in comments. “Oh noes - no autofocus.”

That being said, the R-D1 is somewhat overpriced.

Log of a replicator repairman, courtesy of Something Awful.

Report: We were boarded by some Romulans at about 3:25, smack dab in the middle of my lunch break. Security details were sent to the locations where the Romulans had beamed aboard and a huge sissy fight erupted with phasers. I used the replicator to make a .45 pistol and I went down and shot them all in the head. A couple of them shot at me but I just casually stepped out of the path of their phaser beams. Somehow, LaForge managed to take the credit claiming he “disabled them with a phase-inversion field by venting the plasma containment units.” Oh, is that why maintenance spent three hours cleaning brain-smeared bullets out of the corridor walls on deck 18? Fucking asshole.

Over at Freedom and Whisky, David Farrer traces the history of a quote commonly attributed to F.A. Hayek: “To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything.” Come to find out, that quote ain’t necessarily so. For those with an interest in the movement’s history, this is a fun little snippet.

A fine specimen of the positive finality motif is the stage suicide. Here is what happens. The only logical way of leaving the effect of the end of the play quite pure, i.e. without the faintest possibility of any further causal transformation beyond the play, is to have the life of the main character end at the same time as the play. This seems perfect. But is it?… Generally speaking the best way out is the pistol shot, but it is impossible to show the actual thing - because, again, if treated in a plausible manner, it is apt to be too messy for the stage. Moreover, any suicide on the stage diverts the attention of the audience from the moral point or from the plot itself, exciting in us the pardonable interest with which we watch how an actor will proceed to kill himself plausibly and politely with the maximum of thoroughness and the minimum of bloodshed…We are left thus with only one possibility: the backstage pistol-shot suicide. And you will remember that, in stage directions, the author will generally describe this as a “muffled shot.” Not a good loud bang, but “a muffled shot,” so that sometimes there is an element of doubt among the characters on the stage regarding that sound, though the audience knows exactly what that sound was. And now comes a new and perfectly awful difficulty. Statistics - and statistics are the only regular income of your determinist, just as there are people who make a regular income out of careful gambling - show that, in real life, out of ten attempts at suicide by pistol shot, as many as three are abortive, leaving the subject alive; five result in a long agony; and only two bring on instant death. Thus, even if the characters do understand what happens, a mere muffled shot is insufficient to convince us that the man is really dead. The usual method, then, after the muffled shot has cooed its message, is to have a character investigate and then come back with the information that the man is dead. Now, except in the rare case when the investigator is a physician, the mere sentence “He is dead,” or perhaps something “deeper” like, for instance, “He has paid his debt,” is hardly convincing coming from a person who, it is assumed, is neither sufficiently learned nor sufficiently careless to wave aside any possibility, however vague, of bringing the victim back to life. If, on the other hand, the investigator comes back shrieking, “Jack has shot himself! Call a doctor at once!” and the final curtain goes down, we are left wondering whether, in our times of patchable hearts, a good physician might not save the mangled party. Indeed, the effect that is fondly supposed to be final may, beyond the play, start a young doctor of genius upon some stupendous career of life-saving. So, shall we wait for the doctor and see what he says and then ring down the curtain? Impossible - there is no time for further suspense; the man, whoever he is, has paid his debt and the play is over… So we come to the very curious conclusion that a really ironclad tragedy, with no possible chink in cause or effect - that is, the ideal play that textbooks teach people to write and theatrical managers clamor for - that this masterpiece, whatever its plot or background, 1) must end in suicide, 2) must contain one character at least who is a doctor, 3) that this doctor must be a good doctor and, 4) that it is he who must find the body. In other words, from the mere fact of tragedy’s being what it is we have deduced an actual play. And this is the tragedy of tragedy.” - From a lecture delivered in 1941 at Stanford by Vladimer Nabokov

Here.