Thou shalt order pizza in the following manner ....

Seriously, fruitylips has some very good suggestions here on how to order pizza... and, specifically, how not to order pizza.

Personally, I always hated combo pizzas anyway.  They always look like someone basically swept the counter and called it pizza topping.  The more shit you pile on a single pizza, the more likely it is at least someone will not like something that's on there, or, as fruitylips noted, that you will achieve a pizza no-one in the room is willing to eat.

Interim measures

Well, I managed to uncover my old diningroom chairs from the basement, sorted out the best of the four, and brought it upstairs ....

• The good news:  It doesn't have protruding nails and doesn't hurt to sit on.
• The bad news:  It's about four inches too short to be comfortable as a desk chair.  Right now, I'm actually amazed I ever found them comfortable as dining chairs, but I have to temper that with the recognition that I have about two inches¹ of orthotic insoles in my sneakers that I didn't need when I bought them.

Still, it's a small improvement for now.  I think.  I think we may end up getting rid of these chairs in the end rather than replacing the seat upholstery foam, though.  Which is a shame, because I really love the fabric ... it reminds me of one of the more luxurious Japanese haori I have, the one with the embroidered clouds in gold, silver and shakudo.²

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¹  Yes, I said about two inches.  No, it wasn't a typo.  That's how much heel lift it takes to make it possible for me to walk in a manner approaching normal with my screwed-up left foot.

²  Shakudo is a distinctively-colored alloy of gold and copper.  Yes, we're talking conspicuous consumption here.  Only the Samurai class were permitted to use it.

Supremes on P2P, and other news

As reported by the BBC among others, the Supreme Court has ruled that file-sharing companies are to blame for what users do with their software.  Lower court ruliings hinged upon, and preserved, the prior Supreme Court Sony Betamax decision which states that a manufacturer cannot be held liable for criminal use of a product with substantial non-infringing utility.  In that decision, the Supremes ruled that the majority of people using a video recorder for legal uses outweighs any illegal use.

But in this latest ruling the judges sets aside [sic] this precedent and the lower court decisions and means the makers of a technology have to answer for what people do with it if they use it to break the law.

  (Garbled syntax courtesy of the BBC.)

I don't know about anyone else, but it seems to me that this has possible bad implications for product-liability suits -- in particular, for the anti-gun lobby's tactic of trying to sue firearms manufacturers for criminal use of their products.

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Other news items:

• The US is adding 4,200 cells to existing prisons in Iraq and building a new prison from scratch in Sulaimaniya;
• The director of the Berlin Wall Monument at Checkpoint Charlie is trying to raise 36 million Euros to buy the land it stands on and preserve the memorial.  The memorial contains 1,065 crosses, each dedicated to someone who died fleeing East Germany.
• Meanwhile, Japan's Emperor Akihito is visiting Saipan to pay his respects at a memorial for Japanese war dead from the Second World War, the virst visit he has made to a WW2 memorial outside Japan.  Around 43,000 Japanese troops, 3,500 US troops, and 12,000 civilians died on Saipan during a month of heavy fighting in 1944.  It was a key US victory that placed the Japanese mainland within range of B-29s based on Saipan and neighboring Tinian.
• Two rival consortia bidding to run the European Gaileo satellite-navigation system have joined forces.  The system will orbit 30 satellites by the end of the decade, with the first test satellite due to launch in December on a Soyuz.
• And from the Bitmines' favorite integer, US researchers have created "zombie dogs" in the course of research to develop suspended animation for humans.  The dogs were revived via electric shock and pure oxygen after several hours of clinical death, spent at a body temperature of only 7°C with their blood replaced by saline solution and no brain activity or heartbeat, and showed no brain damage.