"We can't send mail farther than 500 miles from here," he repeated.

"A little bit more, actually.

Call it 520 miles.

But no farther."

Who do you think you are to make demands?! I’m the client, I get to make the demands! It’s not like this is a real job anyway, all you’re doing is drawing.

The RIAA's "business plan" is even worse than I'd guessed it was.

The RIAA paid Holmes Roberts & Owen $9,364,901 in 2008, Jenner & Block more than $7,000,000, and Cravath Swain & Moore $1.25 million, to pursue its "copyright infringement" claims, in order to recover a mere $391,000.

...

As bad as it was, I guess it was better than the numbers for 2007, in which more than $21 million was spent on legal fees, and $3.5 million on "investigative operations" ... presumably MediaSentry. And the amount recovered was $515,929.

And 2006 was similar: they spent more than $19,000,000 in legal fees and more than $3,600,000 in "investigative operations" expenses to recover $455,000.

I will introduce you to some of the basic Japanese Smileys(Emoticons), which is used in e-mails very often in Japan. You can try them as I explain them.

Can your beliefs about religion make it across our intellectual battleground?

In this activity you’ll be asked a series of 17 questions about God and religion. In each case, apart from Question 1, you need to answer True or False. The aim of the activity is not to judge whether these answers are correct or not. Our battleground is that of rational consistency. This means to get across without taking any hits, you’ll need to answer in a way which is rationally consistent. What this means is you need to avoid choosing answers which contradict each other. If you answer in a way which is rationally consistent but which has strange or unpalatable implications, you’ll be forced to bite a bullet.

eSarcasm is a (mostly) satirical site devoted to mockery of all things of a geeky nature. Our mission is to puncture the pompous, ridicule the ridiculous, skewer the silly, and abuse alliteration, all while fighting evil and flossing on a regular basis.

An event as big as a volcano that disrupts transportation around the globe might be expected to have its name added to the English lexicon, perhaps meaning "to cause widespread disruption," an English-language monitor said Tuesday.

...

But what happens when that volcano's name is Eyjafjallajokull, as in the Icelandic volcano whose ash clouds have grounded thousands of flights worldwide?

[President and chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor Paul JJ] Payack was not optimistic. "I've never heard anybody pronounce it right yet, and I couldn't even try," he said.

Steve Jobs' and Apple's great, amazing, fantastic modesty should be a phenomenal, terrific, awesome example to us all. Beautiful!

There are Klingons off the starboard bow, starboard bow, starboard bow. It's worse than that, he's dead Jim, he's dead Jim. It's life Jim but not as we know it, not as we know it. We come in peace, shoot to kill, shoot to kill.

The Windows Browser Ballot, the browser selection screen that is being offered to Windows users in Europe starting this month, is already coming under fire. Slovakian IT news site DSL.sk decided to test the ballot and found that its distribution was very peculiar, with Internet Explorer appearing in the rightmost position almost 50 percent of the time when the ballot was viewed from within IE.

...

This browser ballot, as simple as it is, has been months in the making. The decision to do the randomization client-side, where it depends on the web browser, rather than server-side, where it would be consistent for all users, is a little surprising. But most remarkable at all is that no one responsible for signing off and saying "that's an acceptable response to the Competition Commission's complaint" bothered to do this testing. If this browser ballot is important then surely its implementation should be a high quality one?