Well, thats definitely a good thing. I heard the news from Beijing and despite the fact that I'm straight, male, white, and have been largely un-oppressed my entire life it gives me heart to hear that it isn't all bad news coming from the US. There is hope for tolerance.

So how hungover is everyone this morning?

hahaha, laughing my ass off right now. I would pay money to see a hacker named "Raptor Death Squad" face off against a government program called "Operation Eagle Scream" in a Hacker-esque internet showdown.

my eyes are doing strange things now. Michelle Obama is one of the most incredible people on the planet.

hahaha, i think its a liiiiiittle closer, but yeah, thats a fair analogy

which means trimming unneeded, unwanted, or redundant elements of those bushes to improve the functional aesthetics of the plant or arrangement of plants.

ok, so these guys are not the wizards I am understanding them to be, but from what you describe it sounds like they have advanced the concept of hacking in a way that not only exploits readily available technology but also piggybacks a strong public relations management strategy along with it. They are playing the…

Topiary sounds like it was lifted straight off the cover sheet of a CIA clandestine operation. It actually even sounds a bit outdated, from the sixties or seventies maybe. Today's operational nomenclature has drifted into some fairly abstract, meaningless territory and "Topiary", which means roughly clearing away dead…

Anonymous has already proved themselves to be anti-establishment, but Lulzsec is still an unknown quantity in many ways. Couldn't Lulz actually be the government or security and this be some type of sting? Or is that not possible due to the nature of their exploits to this point? Im not a hacker, computer engineer, or…

whoa, i lived in greensboro for three years, went to grad school at UNCG, and grew up in Randolph County, I may actually know you, which would be weird. But hell yeah for GSO and the 336.

Thank you for that, seriously.

but WHY? I can't figure it out, I've never been able to figure it out, and I've lived in NC for 16 years. Although it is about as blue as southern states get, I'll admit.

This moron has obviously never read a single word of Virginia Woolf, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Jill Lepore, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Jane Mayer, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'connor, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and a couple thousand other female authors of fiction, non-fiction, and journalistic works…

Not to mention the added creepiness of Farmville being a miniaturized social networking platform nested inside another social networking platform, with close to 100 million regular users. Those microgames are just creepy, theyre parasitic. I mean, if ever there was an assault on reality waged by the abstracted…

I know exactly what book you're talking about, its called Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds by Bernd Heinrich. Its a really incredible work, I was surprised how deeply it got into human consciousness, self-awareness, and the complex relationship between individualism and communalism.…

Its been proven, repeatedly, that extreme isolation leads directly and rapidly into violent insanity. Organisms, at least our species, need other organisms to interact with for actual survival. Without other people we would all be throwing feces and thrashing around in intense fits of terrifying madness.

nice, thanks for the link

Your second paragraph does most of my arguing for me. Im not going to digress into counterfactual coulda shoulda nonsense, but this war and the war in Iraq have been egregiously, criminally mishandled. And as far as contextualization, what I am referring to is what you're seeing in the streets (celebration) and what…

haha, thats fucking incredible, there is literally no element in this picture that isn't awesome. The car missle from Live Free or Die Hard, the numbchucks, and a fucking skateboard! hahaha, truly badass.

Reread my comment, i was referring to the run-up and years immediately following the beginning of the war.