That's exactly what I meant. On Slashdot, on any given discussion about the government, inevitably a "20XX is 1984!" post will show up, being all hysterical, and making any real discussion of the matter stupid.

Sometime a given 1984 comparison, intelligently written, might be valid, but excessive airport security is not that topic.

Sometimes I think the Movie and (espeically) the Music industries won't be content until the government outright introduces a "media tax" and gives it directly to the industry, regardless of whether anyone wants to actually buy what they produce.

I've got this crazy (and probably stupid) vision in my head of the RIAA and related organisations that no longer even pretends to produce something, and yet is shoveled money by the government as a way of "protecting artists" or something. Doubt it would ever get that far, but I'm sure some people in said organisations has had a similar, more sinister vision.

Hmmm. A government agency that doesn't actually do anything, yet continues to be fed billions in tax dollars that no one wants to pay. There's a joke in there somewhere.

There needs to be some sort of Godwin's law for 1984 comparisons.

No, I don't like the airport paranoia, but to compare airport security tech to 1984 is rather hysterical.

It would be claiming anti-Arab feelings and sentiment make the US just like Nazi Germany.

Yet on any article about the government on /. it's a simple matter of time when reading the comments before one compares whatever the privacy violation of the day is to 1984. Which generally makes it hard to take seriously.

Yep. My mother works at a drug treatment center, and her view of drugs tends to be... different. She's gone from, in her teens, wearing a Marijuana bracelet, frequently doing LSD and hanging around drug dealers (her 5ish year boyfriend, prior to my father was a coke dealer) to being paranoid about her children taking any drugs, right down to a time when she almost seemed convinced I had nefarious plans with she found Robaxacet in my apartment. She's aware her anti-drug feelings tend to be over the top (and has apologised for being over-paranoid before), but I tend to cut her slack considering the sheer volume of people who have completely and utterly ruined their life, and often the lives of others (frequently horrendously tragically) in drug-related ways.

Though, these days, I pretty much never drink. Not for her sake really, but because I get days of horrendous heartburn (for days) from Alcohol. Still drink up to 10 cups of tea a day though...

Wow. This is one of the stupidest comments I've seen in 10 years of Slashdot.

People buy such games because they enjoy them. If we didn't, we wouldn't buy them.

You might not enjoy "heavily scripted rollercoaster games", and that's perfectly cool. But others do enjoy them, and assuming your tastes are the only acceptable ones is both arrogant and stupid,

I personally don't like vegetables. I can easily see why others do though, and don't go around asking "Why people keep buying these awful tasting weirdly coloured plants to eat is beyond me."

Different people. Different tastes. It's a good thing, and adds variety to life.

Booksurge is great for very niche products. I've bought some stuff that was published with them, that was great, but far, far from mainstream (Neopagan reconstructionism). One can see where a publisher's resources would help (higher rate of spelling errors), but overall, I think self-publishing like that is great for books with a very specific market.

That said, I agree with you that mainstream publishers aren't going anywhere. They do provide valuable services in terms of proofreading, editing and promotion, even if the actual printing aspect is likely to decline in importance.

Somewhere, there's a recording executive reading this article and planning on dispatching a team to try to retrofit DRM onto vinyl records somehow.

Which I imagine would be quite a feat for a purely analog medium.

Either that, or said executive is now more paranoid about the "analog hole" than ever before, and now believes that people are turning to vinyl to pirate music somehow.

Yep. Last I remember of Salon.com was sometime in 2000 or so, they had some decent stuff. Then the paywall went up ages ago, and I forgot they existed. Except for a few times throughout the decade where Google led me to an article of theirs, only to end up being blocked of by the paywall.

Half of me thinks this is just them screaming "LOOK WE DON'T HAVE A PAYWALL ANYMORE". That is, assuming they actually don't.

On second thought, the guy in the picture is bald, so if that's him, I'd say he's more likely to end up as a supervillian. Might be for the best.

Dammit, this is why you're not supposed to reveal your secret identity. He could have been a superhero with a wide array of crazy gadgets, but now if we see some crazy guy with a jetpack stopping crime, everyone will know who it is. :(

I would easily take a free netbook if it were offered. I'd mess around with it, if it was useful, I'd continue using it, if not, it would go in the big pile of laptops I've replaced but haven't gotten rid of yet. (Going back to a PowerBook 540c from 1994, IIRC).

However, I can't see the advertising or whatever actually making up for it, especially considering that a fair number of them wouldn't end up being used at all, and many would end up being used for strange purposes.

The last time I remember a company giving large amounts of free hardware away, to make it up with advertising, was the CueCat disaster. OTOH, the CueCat was pretty useless to begin with, and their company was based only on that junk, IIRC. Even if such an idea tanks, I'm sure google could eat a few billion in losses. Still, I really doubt such a thing will happen. Free netbooks just sound too good to be true.

WHAT!? I thought the internet was a series of tubes. :-/

Well, I guess that answers my question of whether Superman could legally gather evidence for the police using his X-Ray vision.

Good to know. Now I can stop lining my walls with lead and kryptonite.

Now, need to find a case relating to super-hearing.

I agree with you on every count, it sounds very light to me. Though, if the Germans are happy with their law, I feel that's their business, and as a Canadian I don't feel it's my business to tell them how to run their own country, any more than they can try to tell us that we can't use their names.

Pfft. From TV I know we should be able to enhance the image enough so that we can see individual aliens by enhancing that pixel enough.