There are plenty of non-free choices... not so many free. I'd like to keep my little free sandbox thanks. Why do you want to take it from me? Obviously many feel the same way or else Debian wouldn't have such a vital community, and perhaps it follows that one of the historical reasons for this vital community is its philosophy and relatively uncompromising attitude (though too compromising for RMS apparently). I have contributed to Debian, though granted in very small ways, and frankly I'd be less motivated with the community soured and schitzophrenic with concerns completely unrelated to the Debian core mission. I have a friend who has abandoned desktop BSD because the community around it as collapsed after Apples involvement... I really don't want to see RMS being right AGAIN, this time about Debian not being strict enough.

Yeah, you're being facetious, but Debian is the one distro that is still strong on open source principles. This is an uncomfortable development, and it's a step too far IMHO. The non-free repo has been contentious, but it has been argued that it's required eg. unfree firmware to get uncooperative hardware working. Gradually other software has been creeping in, and now this proposition to ship DRM! Games are just psychological cotton candy - addictive empty calories : pay us money, solve this lab-rat maze, and we'll say how awesome you are. There are other distros (Ubuntu, Mint etc...) which were built for this kind of thing so people can still get their cotton candy. Debian has a purpose though, and this compromises that purpose.

It's still worth being uncomfortable about though. Closed is not what Debian is about... it's the ONLY major distro that makes a central point of keeping strong to its open source principles.

Single click solution? UltraVNC SC. All preconfigured and ready to go - you can skin it with a logo, and the GUI even has a list box where you can click on various names (if you've got more than one person doing phone support) - the config could steer traffic to separate ports in your firewall and different support people. VNC can be clunky on slow connections, but because this is a cousin of TightVNC I believe you can get them to install a display capture driver to optimise things. I've seen another similar one-click solution, but I can't remember it.

OK, OK... all the people I mentioned, plus the >10% of the federal members in Germany, all those Kibbutz's in Israel etc... etc... are deluded and should bow to you... the One True and Final Judge on the meaning of the word "communism". I concede the argument. I'll even lend you a stick to beat your straw man with.

...says he was an enthusiastic proponent of violence, but others like Trotsky were for democratically expressed communism. Obviously the modern understanding of communism is closer to Trotskys vision.

Chomsky had an explanation for why most of the world unquestioningly believes the USSR was the true socialist/communist expression - propagandists from both the worlds superpowers wanted it that way for the better part of century. Socialism/communism appealed to post-recession Americans, so the political right pointed to the USSR dictatorship as the inevitable result, and on the other side Stalin and his successors were rolling in socialist rhetoric (being a philosophy widely regarded at the time to be morally superior) to cover the stink of dictatorship.

In the end terms mean what people want them to mean, and that changes over time. My brief reading of Engels

Regarding democratically elected governments at the state level... slim pickings by the look of it... Nepal, Moldova, Cyprus and Mongolia (but I haven't had time to doublecheck this).

...and if Hitler had won WWII we might have been having the same arguments about the inherent evils of capitalism as expressed by the Nazis. Some people express their freedom by tying on snowshoes and spending their lives in arctic wilderness living off the land - I might think it's crazy, but who am I to argue? I think the evil is in dictatorship, not in how an electorate chooses to economically express itself.

I've already mentioned India, Spain, and for short periods (before being undemocratically overthrown) governments in Latin America and the Middle East, at times parts of Italy... If you're going to start saying things like "real communism doesn't use money", I could start asking for you to point to a real capitalist state - practical expressions differ significantly from philisophical underpinnings. Call it socialism then if that makes you feel better, but that doesn't stop these people from calling themselves communists.

Trotsky apparently felt communism was democratic, and Stalin expressed his disagreement with an assassin. The same has been done by capitalist dictators against communist political opposition. I don't think "bloodthirsty and dictatorial" knows a political stripe. Again, I go back to the places which express their democracy in a communist fashion - I've already said it's probably not a way I'd choose to live, but what do you say to the people who've expressed their democratic freedom in communism?

That's what I'm saying - I always assumed communism meant dictatorship, but it apparently does not... just as capitalism does not mean democracy.

Perhaps I should have said "the best part of a millennia" to be more exact?

Change occurs because someone with power wishes it so. Unfortunately the world is almost as likely to get a Vista or Win8 rather than an XP or Win7.

Regarding the "millennia of decline" : Middle Ages, once called the Dark Ages... but apparently some good things happened in there too besides the societal collapse and depopulation, so the unreservedly dark term has become less popular. It was an unambiguous step backwards though that lasted a rather long time.

You should learn some history. Hint: change is not necessarily positive in the short OR even the long term. I forget who said it: "no longer do we need to pine for the knowledge of the ancients"... this was during the enlightenment, a recovery after millenia of decline.