First of all, I am not trying to prove beyond doubt that the US government is doing these things, I am only trying to point out that it is not quite as simple as your previous post suggest (I hope you understand what I am trying to express).

No need for that, of course friends and family will miss the missing person, but what can they do? File a police report? They can't undisappear him. Who would ever know? There is no guarantee that the media would make a big thing out of it.

As I said, I am not trying to prove anything. I am only saying that whether disappearances happen can not be known for certain. You can only make guesses based on e.g. missing person cases and general government behavior. The extreme exception is of course if is a disappearing action somehow goes wrong and becomes public - but that seems unlikely in any case.

Oh and did I mention gitmo, the lack of due process, the governments ability to hold citizens in prisons indefinitely when they invoke all those nice patrior act laws? All of that doesn't count as disappearing people?

You and I may not like white supremacists, but that does not make it ok to just go out and kill them either. If the government is ready to do that, there is no reason they wouldn't act similarly with other unwanted persons - except perhaps for public perception. But we have all seen how much they care about public perception these days.

First of all, by very definition the act of making someone disappear is something you wouldn't know about. Whether this does or does not happen can only be guessed at by looking at general behaviour of the U.S. Second of all, executing political activists - there is always stuff like the Ruby Ridge incident http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge. It didn't work out quite like the FBI had intended, but close enough. I am sure that other slashdotters can contribute with additional cases and/or material.

Dell Precision M6700.

My laptop came equipped with 8 GB RAM - I upgraded it two 32 GB after finding out just how cheap RAM has become nowadays. I must admit to rarely being able to come anywhere near filling this up, but that is a good thing in itself. I still have some ~200 megapixel panoramas I need to stitch with hugin, so maybe it will come in handy then.

that woosh you might be hearing is not a tsunami...

Whether it sounds racist should not be important, whether it is true should be the important distinction. And although I disagree with much of the sentiment behind GPs post, technically it seems to be true. Disclaimer: I don't live in the US and have only limited knowledge about the situation.

His point was that ethnicity was not an important factor in the formation of the US, neither in one direction (separate ethnicities/only ethnicity x) nor in the other direction (melting pot). Basing your country on ideas instead of ethnicity of course encourages some kind of melting pot, but the melting pot is neither the means nor the end - it is just a side effect.

If Valve fucks up, you can say goddbye to all your previous purchases. Admittedly unlikely, but the possibility exists at least on a theoretical level. If MS fucks up with the Xbox one, you can still buy games for PC/PS4/whatever, so I do not see the big difference except for the cost of the Xbox itself. If your only concern is the 500 bucks for the console, which I have just demonstrated to be the only real difference, then you don't seem to be verious serious/consistent about your DRM concerns. But that is for you to decide in the end.

I am truly baffled! Because you don't like their used games sale policy and/or the requirement for an internet connection, your alternative is what - Steam? Are you for real?

I don't quite see your point - he has had YEARS to do that, and still never did.

You think they will stop when we are sick of it? If only that were true...

What a fucking clueless moron you are. You are seriously telling us that some UI Phd knows more about what I and OP like, than we do ourselves? The new interface sucks and I hate it, as do many others. Coming here to tell us that we are wrong about how we feel is disingenious on such a level, it is really quite astonishing.

Sorry, forgot to respond before now.

My post was not about keeping a scorecard either. Basically you are arguing that the set of beliefs held in one country (Islam in Iran) is cause for aggressive behavior, but you are (deliberately?!) ignoring that the example that you mentioned runs completely contrary to your argument.

The specific country in question has not started a war in decades (centuries?), whereas the country you probably (I could be wrong) would hail as having all the right beliefs (United States) is constantly starting new wars. You could have picked a country that has actually started a war, say Iraq (although that was mostly based on US prodding also), but you deliberately picked a country that has not actually done anything of the kind that you are implying.

My conclusion is that you have a dishonest agenda with your posts, otherwise you would not try to deliberately defame Iran without having anything to back it up.

I belive you are quite right, let me expand on what you are saying with a quote from one of my posts on dpreview.

quote follows below:

edispics wrote:
So how would you suggest that all the online software companies should sell their software, online?

It's not the selling online part that is the Problem, piracy happens for online and offline sales.

Keeping in mind that the solution has to protect the companies from piracy as well.

I have several responses to this point:

• 1) I don't have to find a solution, DRM is unethical, end of story. For your education I will provide further information, but this one single reason should be enough for anybody.
• 2) DRM doesn't work. Even the best schemes have been cracked, including single player games requiring the player to be online at all times (a truly infuriating concept).
• 3) companies don't have to use DRM. Piracy has been happening for a long time, and it's only the last few years where companies have been using the truly draconian DRM schemes, such as those requiring am Internet connection. Companies have been doing fine before that, it's only greed that motivates them really. Look at the history of music DRM and you will see an extremely clear example. Music is now mostly sold without DRM as the companies have finally realized that it doesn't help them, and several instances where DRM servers were shut down (forever, not just temporarily) showed the customers how vulnerable DRM leaves their purchases. Look up PlaysForSure on Wikipedia, never has a DRM scheme been named with more irony.
• 4) Companies need to shift their focus from protecting against piracy to serving the needs of their customers, then piracy will be less of a problem - it can never be solved completely. Fair prices, good value, not relying in ridiculous forced borders (region locked content, heavily variable pricing etc.), establishing a connection with the customer (not just treating him as a source of income), and appeals to customers moral senses - those things help combat piracy. Some people will always be pirates or not use the product at all. Those people will never be real customers, and punishing actual customers for the behavior of pirates just alienates your loyal customers.
• 5) in the case of music and movies and video games, studies have repeatedly shown that the people pirating the most content are also those that make the most legitimate purchases (do a Google search on this). For expensive software this is somewhat different, but those cases are mostly about low income persons (students etc. ) just not being able to afford to buy the software legally.

"By comparison, Iran is only happy to wage jihad against countries that have not wronged it, haven't wronged people of the same ethnicity or language (Persian vs. Arab, in case anyone still doesn't realize the difference), and haven't even wronged people belonging to the same flavor of Islam (Shia vs. Sunni being a rather huge divide.)"

Right... Those Persian bastards have really gone too far, first invading Afghanistan, then Iraq, and now they are supporting the terrorists in syria. When will it end? Oh wait, that wasn't actually Iran, that was the US, and Iran hasn't done anything to warrant labeling it the way you do.