The News Topic

[Kagami]

Funimation simulcast of Onepiece in the US and Canada cancelled due to illegal prerelease BEFORE the original airing in Japan.
Synopsis is someone hacked into some accessible servers, found the ready to stream episode complete with logos and english subtitles, and then proceeded to disperse it online, well before the prescribed time.
Needless to say, alot of people are going to be very very very annoyed about this, not to mention the producers in japan....since funimation now states that all simulcasts are postponed indefinetely

expect lawsuits, big ones...that may hamper online dispersion of media, and since here in australia we do not get any of this anyway, it may/will delay our inclusion

[Kagami]

Hope has been 'lost' for an AirFrance airbus carrying 220 passengers over the south atlantic that disappeared from radar screens. As of this point 11 hours later, they are yet to find any sign of the plane.

[Kei]

A fascinating op-ed piece on the differences between liberal and conservative thought processes.


Also... Dick Cheney supports gay marriage?!?!?

[Kei]

People who recieve organ transplants are afraid they might take on the personality of the donor.

[Gothlette]

The heart of a murderer? There is a poem in there somewhere.

[Taiga]

Gotta be an anime in it, for sure.

Actually... it rings a bell.

[QueenDireShot]

Kinda reminds me of Ikkitousen. Each 'toushe' (name for fighters of that kind) is assigned a 'Megatama' which contains the soul of a long dead worrior. These Megatama's make them stronger and show their strength rank. The characters' lives play out the same as that of famous warrior they're assigned. Lets (to make this simpler) say one was given Harry Potter's soul, another Ron Weasley's and a final person Voldemort's.

No matter how much 'Ron' and 'Harry' fight it out, neither will die. This is because 'Harry' can't die until he's killed 'Voldemort' and 'Voldemort' can't kill 'Ron' as he didn't the first time. Worriors are passed down the families, also. No matter how much they try their destinies are sealed. Or so that's how it goes where i've seen up to.

I see a lot of plot holes forming from just that, but they could be resolved later on. I hope so, at the very least. It's mostly a panties-and-nipples fanservice anime.

[Kagami]

most people would be mythological about the heart in these kind of situations, even though the brain does the thinking, it is still generally accepted that the heart is the core of someones being, even though it may be more so in a literal sense. Imagine recieving the heart of a sprinter, and you yourself are an average so-so slacker who likes figurines (*cough*). That heart has been trained or maybe more used to physical effort...therefore it could be said that (assuming i fully recover and all is good) my cardiovascular system had recieved an upgrade.
But since the heart represents the soul, then i'd certainly would not want the heart of a mass murderer...even if he was good at running away from the police.

[Kei]

The heart might have symbolic meaning, but that doesn't translate into reality. You say the heart represents the 'soul'... and I reply that the 'soul' is nothing more than a nebulous unfalsifiable concept that has no observable effect on your body or mind. If anything, most of the traits associated with the soul (personality, identity, etc.) would actually originate from your brain. The heart is a muscle, nothing more.

Suppose you did receive a sprinter's heart... you might have a stronger bloodflow, but your muscles, joints and nervous system would be the same. More blood (and therefore, oxygen) would get to your muscles, but unless you actually trained those muscles your capabilities would remain virtually unchanged. A heart is only a small part of the overall equation.

[Kei]

2012 conspiracy theories, criticized and discredited.

[Kagami]

like the heart is soul theory, 2012 the world will end is just a load of bullwhacky. Of course, that link led on to this one, equally as crap.

[Gothlette]

New Age cults always make me angry. They are taking perfectly respectable pagan beliefs and turning them into watered-down shells of their original glory. These people do not join these cults because they have any genuine desire to serve the gods; they merely want a shallow feel-good experience without any deep spirituality or meaning.

Whoops, sorry about the rant. ^^

[Kei]

Two more gun-related tragedies.

A 9-year-old boy is accidentally shot with a shotgun by his 11-year-old brother over a video game argument. Oddly enough, the right-wing pundits seem to think the video game is responsible for this shooting, not the UNATTENDED SHOTGUN.

Yesterday, an anti-semite gunman walked into the Holocaust Museum and opened fire, fatally shooting one guard and wounding another. The gunman was then non-fatally shot by the other guards.

I've asked this before, and I'll keep asking until something is done to end these tragic and pointless deaths: Can we outlaw guns NOW? Please?

[Kei]

President Obama writes a school absence note.

[Shamisen]

Fees Could Ground Charity Medical Flights

FAA Change, Fuels Pilot Outcry

I really don't mind paying my fair share, this however is becoming a way to restrict the only way some others get help, it's becoming a very, unfair, world once again...

[Kagami]

Michael Jackson died this morning of a heart attack. Althought its apparently unconfirmed, the TV is going nuts...

EDIT: NBC and Channel 7 (here in AUS) confirm the death

[Shamisen]

This is so true and painful to read.

Here's another example of a Watch Dog Group that gets ignore because it's legally toothless.. Yet people have died, needlessly, because of inaction taken on this groups recommendations.

[Katyusha]

Michael Jackson is dead.


....

....

Yeah, I'll just let that bit sink in.

It feels... odd somehow.

[Shamisen]

Michael Jackson is dead.


....

....

Yeah, I'll just let that bit sink in.

It feels... odd somehow.

Yeah.. Welcome back stranger..
Contribute all you like.. Okay?

[Shamisen]

Jackson dies, almost takes Internet with him.

*Courtesy CNN*

LONDON, England (CNN) -- How many people does it take to break the Internet? On June 25, we found out it's just one -- if that one is Michael Jackson.

The biggest showbiz story of the year saw the troubled star take a good slice of the Internet with him, as the ripples caused by the news of his death swept around the globe.

"Between approximately 2:40 p.m. PDT and 3:15 p.m. PDT today, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson," a Google spokesman told CNET, which also reported that Google News users complained that the service was inaccessible for a time. At its peak, Google Trends rated the Jackson story as "volcanic."

As sites fell, users raced to other sites: TechCrunch reported that TMZ, which broke the story, had several outages; users then switched to Perez Hilton's blog, which also struggled to deal with the requests it received.

CNN reported a fivefold rise in traffic and visitors in just over an hour, receiving 20 million page views in the hour the story broke.

Twitter crashed as users saw multiple "fail whales" -- the illustrations the site uses as error messages -- user FoieGrasie posting, "Irony: The protesters in Iran using twitter as com are unable to get online because of all the posts of 'Michael Jackson RIP.' Well done." The site's status blog said that Twitter had had to temporarily disable its search results, saved searches and trend topics.

Wikipedia saw a flurry of activity, with close to 500 edits made to Jackson's entry in less than 24 hours. CNET reported that by 3:15pm PDT, Wikipedia seemed to be "temporarily overloaded."

The LA Times, the first news organization to confirm Jackson's death, suffered outages. The site also reported that AOL's instant messenger service had been hit, quoting an AOL statement that said, "AIM was down for approximately 40 minutes this afternoon." The statement said, "Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We've never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth."

By Friday morning, news sites seemed to be coping with traffic but Jackson fan site mjfanclub.net was still performing sluggishly. Mashable.com reported that tributes to, and remarks upon, Michael Jackson's death were responsible for 30 percent of tweets.

As with any breaking piece of news on the Web, the reports of Jackson's death sparked something of a feeding frenzy -- and with that came rumor that dragged in other celebrities completely unconnected to the King of Pop's death.

One Wikipedia prankster wrote that Jackson had been "savagely murdered" by his brother Tito, who had strangled him "with a microphone cord."

Soon rumors spread online that movie star Jeff Goldblum had fallen from the Kauri Cliffs in New Zealand while filming his latest movie. On several search engines, "Jeff Goldblum" soon became the only non-Jackson-related term to crop up in the top 10.

The rumors forced Goldblum's publicist to issue a statement to media outlets, saying: "Reports that Jeff Goldblum has passed away are completely untrue. He is fine and in Los Angeles."

At the same time Harrison Ford was also rumored to have fallen from a yacht off the south of France.

Web site snopes.com, which shoots down rumors, gossip and urban legends -- and how they originated -- said the likely culprit was a Web site which allows users to input celebrity names -- and then inserts them into fake templated stories (a further variant has stars dying in a plane crash).

In a sense the feeding frenzy was understandable -- Jackson's death, coming only hours after that of 1970s icon Farah Fawcett, left many Web users, shocked by the news of Jackson's death, asking what would happen next. In this febrile climate any rumor runs the risk of being seized on, believed and treated with more credulity than usual.

The need of the professional media to be first with the news -- many did for a short time report the Goldblum rumor as fact -- adds further veracity. And, of course, the whole process is speeded up by the Web.

[Kei]

Google announces their own operating system to challenge Windows.

[Kei]

The most awesome service dog EVER.

[Kagami]

Amazing what trained dogs can do, eh? I've always admired seeing eye dogs, but this is something else...

[Kei]

Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso calls an August 30th snap election. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party of Japan is still going strong.

[Stilts]

Journalism legend Walter Cronkite died today.

This isn't really a shocking development--in addition to being 92, he also wasn't able to make his annual trip to Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism last year due to health issues. It is, however, a very sad one, as Cronkite was one of the best journalists we've ever had.

[Kei]

Math professor brings students into the fold with origami.

[Stilts]

Score yet another point for science fiction. Oxford scientists have recently created an entirely new state of matter. And what name have they given their new discovery? Transparent aluminum, of course. Granted, the aluminum stayed in that state so briefly that they had to measure it in units I didn't even know existed (what the heck is a "femtosecond"?), but it's still pretty cool.

There's no word yet on whether the team lead happened to have a Scottish accent or was missing a finger.

[Kei]

An 11-year-old girl is killed through the power of prayer.

[Kei]

Sarah Palin vs. the English Language

[Kei]

The LDP's campaign tactics are remarkably similar to those of the Republicans.