Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to Sacha,
Drugs also fail as a comparison because if you use them, they're gone. Digital media, not so
Mind you, in the mega download age the chances of me actually consuming something in my collection are low. The enjoyment of each one would require fine instrumentation to measure. And I don't even download anything, just occasionally enjoy a hard drive copying seshon with mates.
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Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to anth,
That didn’t happen of course, all we know is that the gun wasn’t used.
It was also a sawn off shotgun, not commonly used for anything except scaring people at close range. Owning that is nearly the only thing I would hold against Mr Dotcom. Except the matter of befriending Mr Banks (I wonder if Banksy told him he should really keep the gun under his bed).
Banksy conveniently can't remember anything about the time he drove out to Coatesville in his overcompensating red Ferrari, and had dinner with Dotcom. These things happen when you're mayor.
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SkyNet: Pay up, tune in, zone out.
SkyNet: Where we vampires always pwn you zombies -
Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to Russell Brown,
LOL, the video of him driving real fast is great. His evil laugh was perfect "mhhehehe Dr Evil iz alvays getting avay vis it. hehmmeheh".
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Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to nzlemming,
I'd be really interested to know if Dotcom installed the panic room, or the Chrisco people :-D
Heh. I bet he's the only one who used it, though. Cracks me up, the idea of using a panic room against the police, though. Did he think they'd just give up and go away in the end?
He should have had an escape tunnel, if it was the police he was avoiding, leading to a cave with bushes that part as his amphibious car slips out. He could have got to his submarine before they even got into the panic room.
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Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to Tom Semmens,
I was shocked at the level of state force used in the raid – 76 armed police and two helicopters to arrest four geeks with no history of violence.
Mind you, one of them was finally cut from his panic room and found to have a shotgun for company. Does strike me as an especially paranoid bloke. Presumably the number of police might have been informed by a little bit of undercover work, and any time you find someone has made their house into Fort Knox, you don't take chances.
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Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to Tom Beard,
Any word yet on the number of trombones?
Yes, only 6 of them were rusty.
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OnPoint: Association of Community…, in reply to Ross Mason,
Since this is a reference to tobacco, "quality product" has to be the oxymoron of the month.
Not really. You can have a quality handgun or a crappy one, despite the sole purpose of it being to harm humans. Indeed the quality one is probably more fit for that purpose. If you're going to use something as harmful as tobacco, I can see that you'd want to do it with the best stuff you could afford.
I was only joking, really about the fact that homegrown has not gained popularity. The forces that work to get people smoking are anathema in every way to that kind of concept. Growing your own requires time and patience, and some labor at something you'll have to teach yourself. Probably, you wouldn't make it into cigarettes, which are the epitome of an industrial product, an instant and convenient (you can buy them practically everywhere) product that burns evenly and leaves a waste byproduct. Growing would never be cool, the very idea could only be used by property owners free from parental control. Not the kids that cigarettes are targeted at. So long as it's forbidden to let anyone else do the work except for big tobacco, the natural barrier of having to do something more than tear open a packet and light the thing is sufficient to keep them in their mega billions. Such is the modern world. Our addictions are much deeper than physical.
They're like sports drinks, which anyone could make the equivalent of for about 10c a bottle, by adding sugar and salt to water. No, the main differentiation is not really on the effects of these drinks (because there really is fuck all difference to most people's ability to train between drinking a sports drink or drinking tap water), but rather all the minor differentiations, like the subtleties of the taste, the attractive bottle, and the story it tells about you releasing your inner potential using the power of ozone, or whatever the latest trick is to sell something that costs about 1c/liter. Indeed, many of them have nothing more than water, they don't even hide it. It's sold as an advantage, a more pure product. Classic, really. We wonder why our economy is fucked, yet we buy water from Coca Cola Amatil, and pay more for it than we would for a Coke.
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OnPoint: Association of Community…, in reply to bmk,
Or it might be that every bit of home-grown tobacco I have ever smoked has been foul. Maybe if somebody could produce a quality product that might be different.
This. Like so many acquired tastes (and the acquisition of a taste for tobacco is typically a very forced affair, the very epitome of forcing oneself to do something the body recognizes as harmful from the very first touch of it on the throat) I think people home in quite quickly on a preference. Since most people do not start with home grown, it's likely to taste as gross to them as tobacco smoke tastes to most people the first few times. The homing in gets tighter until it has to be an exact and particular type of cigarette - just yesterday a guy walked into my local dairy with trembling hands and bleary eyes, and asked for Camel cigarettes. The owner shrugged sadly, and the guy pursed his lips, sucked it up, and left without buying anything, clearly his search for the right cigarettes had been going on for some time now. I just thought "you poor bastard, that's one hell of a monkey on your back, leading you on a merry dance around the city". Although I wonder if even the ritual of the hunt for the right tobacco forms part of the addiction, that it's so much sweeter when hunted down, satisfying that primitive urge too.
I'm sure it is a very difficult affair to make home grown as even a pale imitation of what the highly processed kind is like. And it's not just about the nicotine, not by a long stretch. My brother, a heavy smoker, rebuffed my suggestion that electronic cigarettes could possibly save him a lot of money and are known to be less harmful. He said he'd tried them, but the loss of the ritualistic element was the most missed part, and he couldn't stick with it.
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OnPoint: Association of Community…, in reply to Tuo Lei,
LOL, true.I think I can make my own basil and urea, but I'm all out of 4-(2,6,6-Trimethylcyclohexa-1,3-Dienyl)But-2-En-4-One
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