Car companies should limit features in their cars when sold as used. Say GM can disable the GPS or in-dash entertainment when their car is on-sold to someone else and then offers an upgrade to the new owner, all because the new owner isn't rewarding the thousands of engineers and designers who put so much work into that car.

No, bullshit and that reasoning would not be accepted by consumers in any other industry. So why do publishers constantly treat their customers like a piece of shit and why does the average consumer accept it?

Replace oil with natural gas and you'd be a little closer to the truth.

Who says I am?

I hear Greece is looking to offload a couple of Islands to pay for their debt problems.

Now all we need is a name...

There's a pattern to this. Politicians at the behest of self-interest groups and self-appoint moralists, begin to regulate what was a benign social issue. Uninformed, policy gets drafted by these people which gains traction from these self-interest, righteous minorities and soon thanks to ignorant third-parties the very inaccuracies that are used to draft these policies are perpetuated. The use of loaded words like criminal, scourge & terror helps to convince a mostly oblivious public. Before long the regulation comes into effect and pushes the issue underground, initially it's deemed a success. However as it becomes apparent that the matter is thriving underground, a war is declared, harsher penalties combined with the perpetuation of gross-inaccuracies and lies continue to waste your tax dollars.
It's history repeating itself, and it's always follows a similar pattern. Though the end result is the same; tax dollars are wasted, usage increases unabated and the constant game of cat and mouse continues because those elected to listen to the people who know best, won't.

If I went about my job with the same level of ignorance, incompetence and sheer corruption as the supposed leaders of the United States, I'd be out of a job very quickly. If the private sector won't tolerate it, why does capital hill seem to be a breeding ground for these bottom-feeders?

This is true for any OS on the market, under *nix or BSD once you give a process the ability to run under root (Which involves a nondescript password entry) then it can do anything to that system. However the difference in Windows is the long history of exploits which bypass UAC and privilege escalation and are able to spawn a new process as administrator, all without user permission.*

*Clicking on free viagra links don't count.

Working for the IFPI is akin to prostitution with all the morality and ethics associated with child prostitution.

And the US government was billed $1400 for it...

If every American gamer used a satellite connection maybe some Australian's and Europeans would start winning a few online matches.

No, never!

To begin, we all agree that piracy is a form of stealing? A content creator loses out on a royalty every time someone downloads their material, though by the same token it's not as if by someone downloading this material they're inhibiting other people from accessing that same material.

Big media would rather avoid the elephant in the room and use piracy as the scapegoat for their broken business model. What I said above about not inhibiting someone else from accessing that material is a real game-changer. One that takes their old business model of controlling both content and distribution and renders it outdated and comparably inconvenient to consumers.
Consumers know what they'd like to see in response from big media, better pricing (Since you're no longer paying for the manufacturing of physical media, or the take from retailers and distributors), in a format that is versatile, agnostic and accessible to the consumer. Study after study quite clearly states that people are willing to pay a reasonable price for content as opposed to stealing it.

Rather than address their own failings and the thought that their business model broken for close to twenty years, big media would rather cut their own throats through unpopular campaigns, dirty politics, blatant lying and launching an expensive, pointless campaign against their own (potential) customers. Amazingly the only outcome of all of this has been an increase in piracy and how readily people will accept it as an alternative. Somehow big media in the process legitimized piracy in the eyes of the public.

The day will come when a class action is filed when thousands of users have their personal details stolen and that clause will be challenged in court. I really don't see a judge ever excusing a company's gross negligence in keeping user data private because customers "signed" away their right for remediation or compensation.

I'd also like to point out that these offences don't require launching a civil case against the company. The ACCC (The consumer protection agency) will launch any legal case against the infringing company.

With all the clapping you'd think North Korea was one giant Apple store.