Hopefully the wine project and Valve are working together on this and that linux version of steam pops up soon. I installed DAO via steam in linux the other day and there was an intermediate step about configuring wine (in the windows version of steam) that gives me some hope.

You, sir, have done more to help linux gain respect and use than any of those haters have. Bravo!

The software management module is just a frontend to zypper, which works pretty much identically to apt.

http://susestudio.com/

Build your own image with USB as your target. The process is simple and streamlined (and they have videos).

I use openSuSE, as do most of the people I know. It doesn't have the warm fuzzies that people seem to get off Fedora and it doesn't have the nerd chic/new hotness feeling that Ubuntu has (which many, many others have had before, I might add), but it is a very well-maintained and established distro with probably the best configuration/installation (yast is very nice) of the lot, and has benefited from closeness to both the GNOME and KDE projects.

It's a nice distro.

Not actually true. Many states have crimes for wiretapping or even just recording. These are extremely useful laws, especially as a curb on overly enthusiastic law enforcement.

"In a rare outburst of subjectivity . . . ."

ahahaha what?

I like how slashdot commenters love to use "won't somebody think of the children?!" as a device for sarcastic mockery of various Internet policies. Then this happens, and we get a thread full of ...

"But ... won't somebody think of the children?!"

I don't know where this myth came from (probably people trying to make moral rather than legal or logical arguments about piracy). There are federal criminal laws regarding copyright and trademark infringement. Many, many states have their own versions.

"anyone can put a public key on their homepage and sign everything they write."

You have an interesting definition of "anyone."

Most of the problems you raise are pretty trivially solved by remembering that it's the government talking about this. AT&T tries to keep your identity to impersonate you? The government can lock AT&T out of the system, or fine the crap out of them, or whatever sanction they want. This actually reminds me somewhat of the records provisions of HIPAA, which are actually pretty good about making sure records are used properly and are given to the people who are supposed to have them (too bad they're all a bunch of incoherent sheafs of paper).

Of course, these burdens have other names, like "costs of doing business properly" and "helping to contain liability."

'Most people who illegally download movies, music and TV shows would pay for them if there was a cheap and legal service as convenient as file-sharing tools like BitTorrent.'

If only someone would create an online service which allowed you to buy music! What kind of twisted mockery of a universe do we live in that has kept this from happening?

Why must the universe mock us so?! WHY?!

(For reference, it is raining behind me, and I am wet. The two are not related.)

Yesterday I needed to boot into windows (the D&DI Character Generator doesn't work in wine, as far as I can tell), and I was greeted after boot with a lovely screen telling me that the system was broken and in need of repair. So my two options were restore from backup or repair. I had no backup, so I went to repair, and under "select drive," there was no system install. Windows had apparently uninstalled itself.

I'm still trying to sort out what happened.