After reading all the top-rated comments here, I have to think that the Slashdot crowd has given up on evidence-based solutions to problems.

From the TFS: "Reducing the availability of highly lethal and commonly used suicide methods has been associated with declines in suicide rates of as much as 30%-50% in other countries (PDF)."

Who said anything about forbidding suicide? They are just talking about reducing the availability of easy routes to suicide. I just don't understand why anyone would be against that, as it is not impinging on anyone's rights. The only thing it does is to help prevent someone from making a rash decision while they are not thinking straight.

It's a little bit like IT security. You can't stop the people who are really determined to get to their objective, but you can stop the casual attempts. In this case, you will give people a chance to think twice about this very ultimate decision.

You may not be aware that there is lots of openly expressed racism in Europe - apparently much more so than in the US. This includes Italy. One of Italy's top soccer strikers (Mario Balotelli), who happens to be black, has suffered a lot of racist chants, and he's by no means the only example.

Highlander II actually: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...

Yeah, I came here to say that we should probably think a bit more carefully about doing stuff that even a bad fantasy/sci-fi movie recognized was a bad idea.

Maybe they can't sell the stuff because no one knows who actually owns it. What chance do they have without even a proper land registry? I heard about this in a comment on The Economist, and couldn't believe it, but then found more details here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05...

Like I replied to the parent post, this is non-sequitur. Every news agency in the world reported this news. No one needed to actually show the deed.

Or do you want your local news to show videos and photos of actual murders and rapes on a nightly basis? Is that what you consider reporting the news?

Isn't that a non-sequitur? Every news agency in the world reported the news of this killing and described how it was done. That was enough. It's been a long-standing tradition not to show the actual moment when someone is killed, so this had nothing to do with reporting the news.

The fact that such a horrific killing was shown likely points to it having been mostly a political decision, i.e. either to make Obama look bad, to put pressure to send in ground troops or some other level of escalation, or perhaps all of the above. Kill two or three birds with one stone.

I guess I had never read their comments section before. It's a cesspool of ignorant, vicious comments!

I can understand his obsession with one particular grammar error, because I have a little bit of an obsession myself with people mixing up affect and effect. It's very, very common. I would say that up to about half the time I see someone use one of those words or derivatives (i.e., +ing, etc) they should have used the other word. Although I haven't spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours of my time to correct every instance of it that I find.

The cards that American banks are switching to are chip-based (and EMV-compatible) because of new regulations, however, the vast, vast majority of them are going to be chip-and-signature, not chip-and-pin like in Europe. This unfortunately means that the special signature procedures for Americans will continue to hold you up in line, for the foreseeable future.

The cards that American banks are switching to are chip-based (and EMV-compatible) because of new regulations, however, the vast majority of them are going to be chip-and-signature, not chip-and-pin like in Europe. This unfortunately will still lead to inability to pay at automated machines with no attendants.

Perhaps you're right. It's possible that they are just offering a time-limited free version upgrade straight up, and that all other licensing policies are the same. That's an interesting theory for the reason too.

I would call their OEM licenses up to Windows 7 relatively cheap, but not super-cheap. I meant super-cheap as in $50 or under, how Apple had been pricing OS X upgrades before they went free in the most recent versions.

"It's a trap" may actually have been premature. Let's see the details first. Maybe they are just going the same route as Apple did, but the thing is they don't have the big hardware profits that Apple does, so I don't know what their plan is.

Is it integrated into the BIOS, or are they doing the traditional thing of recording the serial numbers of your CPU, hard drives, etc, and flagging any changes?

Actually retail licenses are supposed to be transferable as you upgrade computers, etc. OEM licenses, on the other hand like you described, are tied to the specific hardware.

Reading that blog in more detail, I think I understand what they are doing. "Supported lifetime of the device" *probably* means that the license will be tied to the hardware and will not be transferable. Perhaps they will generally make licenses super-cheap, but not transferable? Or perhaps they will go subscription-only on new devices.

"IT'S A TRAP!" may be appropriate here. We will find out for sure soon enough.