Because only a tiny sliver of us recognize this as a far-from-ideal situation. Somebody's running around slashdot with the sig "The first mistake you can make as a libertarian is believing that you represent the people". He's dead-on. Most Americans want to hand the government limitless power in exchange for protecting their precious children from all the big, bad monsters hiding in the bushes just waiting to spring on them. In fact, most of them don't even realize their mistake when they're the ones who's lives are destroyed.

I was listening to the radio yesterday and they were talking about the subject of teenage girls "texting" naked pictures of themselves to teenage boys and a caller called in and pointed out, "and these poor boys will go to jail for having these pictures." Nobody seemed to consider the fact that maybe the law itself was unreasonable, or even seem to be able to comprehend the very possibility. The government is all-knowing, all-powerful, always right and always trustworthy.

Hey, that's going to my excuse if I ever get caught, too!

Yep, I say "more government", you read "any government - down with the police! down with the fire department! bring on the anarchy!". Like I said, never ceases to amaze me.

And when he says "we", he means "you", not "him". He's the one that needs taken care of.

Er... "almost like"? I can't speak for the OP, but that's exactly what I'm saying. Seeing as how it's true and all.

Sigh... not sure if you're trolling there or just making a bitter point - but a point you have, there. It never ceases to amaze me how many people believe, after centuries and centuries of contrary evidence, that more government will make their lives better. It's the same on both sides (and there really are only two sides, since we libertarians seem to represent a statistically insignificant sliver of the population) - the only reason we have any freedom at all is because both sides can't seem to agree on what the government should control. Fortunately (from the perspective of the anti-libertarians) they finally seem to have put aside their differences and agreed to just control everything.

Wow... my cybernanny work filter won't even let me pull up that link (how unreasonable is that?). I guess I'll have to take a look when I get home. For another example, google "Paul Little" (I think he was sentenced to like 10 years or something). Your government hard at work, making the world no safer than it was before.

Huh? I think you're getting mixed up here... everybody I've ever heard from (except you, evidently) is either all for outlawing obscenity and hate speech, or opposed to obscenity and hate speech laws. At the very least, I think we're consistent when it comes to this.

Tell that to Christopher Handley, who was recently sentenced to 15 years for possession of animated Japanese (underage) porn. Dude, obscenity is whatever the hell somebody else doesn't like.

As you can see from the above post, it's not just the AARP people, unfortunately.

Wow... I hate to break this to you, but it wasn't really that hard for us... I certainly didn't need or want any mentoring, beside the odd technical book or code samples (you know, like the ones that are freely available as open source).

What I did, when I first started learning C and later when I first started learning Java, was to follow the newsgroup (comp.lang.c or comp.lang.java), and solve as many of the problems that were asked as I could (although in many cases, if it was obvious that this was somebody's homework assignment, I didn't necessarily post my solution back to the newsgroup). The "rentacoder" problems tend to be quite a bit more involved and poorly specified IMO.

Careful, there... there's a free-speech-advocating mob here on slashdot who you'd hate to have your address if "mob justice" comes back into fashion.

Is that really the only thing you anti-free-speech people can come up with? I mean, really... if I wanted to cause chaos and yelled "fire" in a crowded theater - assuming that people really did trample each other and get hurt, rather than just filing out in an orderly fashion or looking around, saying, "I don't see a fire. Where? What fire?" and then going back to their movie - I could always claim that I saw a fire, sorry about all that, don't know what happened to the fire...

That's interesting... I've been putting together simple 2D games for fun since I was a little kid and - the pixelart has always been by far the biggest problem I've had. The programming was always relatively straightforward. What do you use for pixel art? I've tried jdraw, inkscape, gimp (shudder...)... are there any actually good tools for this sort of thing?

Not that I have any desire to pursue this as a career - the horror stories on Slashdot talked me out of that years ago...