By spending $5 on something, you would be telling Valve that you're a paying customer and not a freeloader who's actively working to destroy their system?

However, with your rant you are telling me that you're a paranoid drama queen.

But I may be biased, because this will cost me nothing because I have already paid more than $5 to buy some cheap games during the summer and winter sales. I would imagine that for the vast majority of Steam's customers it will also cost them nothing because they are actually customers and have spent some money with Steam at some point in the past. You represent a corner case, a rare exception, a freeloader who legitimately (by your claim) uses Steam's services without ever paying Valve anything.

I've seen this claim before (probably from you), but I'm don't know what game you bought that you think entitles you to permanent and unlimited access to all the services of Steam in perpetuity.

A) You're not important enough for them to mess with specifically.
B) The fact you "trust them with your business" might be influencing your understanding of the charges against them.

I don't think you understand as much as you think you do.

For one the post you replied to was about what Microsoft would have done if it had been "as evil" as Google. Re-read it.

On the topic of your other claim, Microst didn't not just provide "their web browser as a default with their OS". That's just part of one of the tricks that they played. They provided Internet Explorer for the sole purpose of preventing and delaying the development of web-based alternatives to Windows and Office. They licensed Internet Explorer (guaranteeing Spyglass a percentage of every copy sold) and provided it for free to cut off Netscape's money supply (screwing Spyglass over as well in the process). Mind you, Netscape wasn't even a competitor of Microsoft's until it made the deal with Spyglass. Microsoft was scared of the power of the Internet and the Web and purposely engaged in a campaign to sabotage the development of software that was operating system independent and subvert the internet, if they could.

They also forced manufacturers to sign deals where if they wanted to be able to sell any computers with Windows on them, they had to agree to ship them with Internet Explorer and only Internet Explorer.

Furthermore, they then tied Internet Explorer into the operating system and spread it's code across other system DLLs so it couldn't be removed easily without breaking Windows. They made it load on boot so it would load faster then competitors, and used undocumented APIs that were faster than the standard ones to give themselves an advantage. When competitors tried to use those same undocumented APIs, Microsoft would introduce changes to sabotage their competitor's products while simultaneously updates for IE that worked around the newly introduced bugs.

However, once Netscape had been destroyed and the threat of "operating system-less software" was gone, Microsoft essentially dropped Internet Explorer into a deep dark hole. They barely touched it for almost 9 years, which just goes to show that it was all about destroying a potential threat to the monopoly. Sure when you say they gave something away for free it doesn't sound bad, but it is actually an anti-competitive practice called flooding the market and it is evil and illegal when you have a dominant position in one market and use that tactic to extend your dominance into another area.

I understand that some people are too short sighted, too stupid, or too libertarian to understand why this was important, but this is just one of many campaigns of reckless destruction that Microsoft has engaged in to protect their cash cows.

You know, it could be childish and true... Microsoft has a long and sordid history of going far beyond what "*every* business does" to compete. Whether or not they're evil, they have proven over and over again that they can't be trusted.

Who says there would be nothing classified under Title 1? As far as I understand we're talking about reclassifying internet connections as Title 2, everything else that ISPs do (like email service, web hosting, etc.) would remain Title 1.

Ah, the Libertarian ideal... Do everything yourself so the other bastards can't screw you over. It warms the cockles of my heart.

Naturally, you become a libertarian and claim that everyone who disagrees with you is a lazy parasite.

That's a great idea, let the stupid decide what the laws should be. Marriage isn't a religious institution, it's a legal institution. It's a contract and it always has been. The religious ceremony literally means nothing legally. You can be married without a ceremony and you can be not married despite having the ceremony. The ceremony is the fluff, the marriage certificate you sign during (or after) the ceremony is the actual important part. Marriage is civil law.

Furthermore, in America marriage has never been solely the province of religion, and can never be so. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" is the very first amendment of your constitution. If marriage is a religious institution then government has no business making any laws about it. So anyone who believes that marriage is a religious institution and thus gays shouldn't be allowed to get married is wrong, because either it's not religious and the government has no obligation to bow to the views of some Christians or it is and the government is legally prohibited from doing so by it's own constitution.

Additionally, please note that some churches are perfectly happy to marry gay couples and preventing them from doing would be an actual infringement on their religious liberties unlike the bullshit argument that not allowing you to prevent a gay couple from getting married is somehow restricting your liberty.

I knew I'd seen your argument before. People before you believed that blacks didn't need to be married because they weren't really people, and then they opposed mixed race marriages because black and whites shouldn't mix that way. Most likely, 20 years from now you will vehemently deny that you were ever this homophobic.

The latter, of course, but you are engaging in the same bullshit as Fiorina. Has it ever occurred in your sorry excuse for a brain that Tim Cook might oppose both activities? When will you navel-gazing idiots learn that "somebody else did something worse" is never a good reason for tolerating injustice?

Then why pass a law to enable anti-gay people to break contracts with gay people? It certainly wasn't "the left" that passed the law. Get a clue before you spout your ignorant nonsense.

This is all about Fiorina positioning herself for her bid for the Republican presidential candidacy, however, her comments are pure bullshit. You can't require a trillion dollar multi-national company stop doing business in every jurisdiction that has laws or policies the CEO disagrees with and It's not hypocrisy to use your free speech rights to advocate against policies that are abhorrent to you. It's also not hypocrisy to allow people from countries that have policies you're fighting against to give money to your charitable organization. However, Fiorina is holding other people to standards to she would never hold herself to, and that is hypocrisy. Of course, Fox News not only airs this bullshit but airs it uncritically and that's one of the reasons so many people despise Fox News. The only reason this is news is that she is making a bid for the presidency, otherwise this would another be "washed-up has-been says stupid things" story on page 27.

Frankly, I expect better from Fox News and I expect better from someone who wants to be president than moronic reactionary criticism.

Bullshit. You don't believe this, it's just an excuse to enable your prejudice. If you really believed it you'd be up in arms over opposite-sex married couples who don't have children and supporting same-sex couples who have children (adopted or other wise).

Good, because if the models predicted events that did not happen, that would be a bad sign for them. The "polar ice refreezing" that you are refering to didn't happen. Polar ice did rebound from a record low, which it was widely expected to do. In fact, every record low polar ice year is followed by a few years that are higher than the record low before until we reach the next record low. However, the overall trend is still downward.

From my understanding, that is correct. Warming in the arctic is changing the wind flow which is allowing colder Arctic air to be pushed over the North East section of North America.

The National Science Foundations seems to think it will be 1 or 2 million years from now. Are you sure you know the difference between reporters and scientists?

Maybe, the flip out at you because it's not true? Mars isn't warming.