Me too! So far, so good!

New, certainly, but that's a tautology. Better? Always? What's your definition of "better"?

You're often contagious long before you're symptomatic. Not getting vaccinations is as mathematically stupid as playing the lottery, just in the opposite direction.

Exactly.

All the problems have an easy shortcut. Make choice, click submit. Score go up? Hit back, next question. Stay the same? Next choice.

Why do I feel like I just watched somebody jerk off?

For a fairly in-depth exploration of this, read Altered Carbon.

I'll decide who realMe is.

He doesn't think he speaks for most gaming enthusiasts? How do you know? Can you read minds? Cool!

I don't think that's even possible.

The fact that this is a massive assumption once the codebases start diverging was the point of the GP post.

I wouldn't say I hate any given group of people right now. Unless you want to try to lump bigots themselves into a group, and say that I'm bigoted against them... but I don't even really hate them. I'm disgusted by their words and actions, but the people themselves I only pity. Going through life like that, with all that fear and insecurity... it must be awful. I bet they wouldn't be that way if they could choose.

Have you taken a long hard look at this stance? It's easy to "always" do something because you've always done it, but I've found that when I really look at the past me, it turns out that he's been wrong a lot. I used to believe this as well, but on further examination, I've come to realize that I only held that belief because it was convenient. It allowed me to listen to a band I liked, even though they'd made some statements that were ignorant at best. Pretty similar to this situation, really.

I'm not saying you should stop enjoying something just because the artist is, oh let's just pick a totally random example and say a frightened crazy bigot. I'm not saying you should even care to look it up--there's only so much time in the day, after all. But you certainly shouldn't intentionally ignore that information, any more than you should pull a $20 out of your wallet and set it on fire. That artist's views, along with everything else in their lives, informed their art. Do you really believe that knowing this about the author doesn't put some of what he wrote into a new light? He's a science-fiction author, a genre known for examining morals. Even if he tried, which very few do, to separate his own personal morals from what he writes, do you think there's any chance he succeeded?

As long as you're a human being, and not a computer, you are biased. While a computer can run a program, impartially applying an algorithm to an input and produce a consistent output, you cannot. You're changed by every bit of input you receive. The best you can do is try to make the change a positive one. Tossing out information like this puts you at a disadvantage there. You're trying to make yourself like a computer, but the best you'll achieve is sharing their biggest vulnerability; garbage in, garbage out.

Maybe this will change in the future, but as of today, I hope that if I ever become a hateful bigot, society will spurn me. Is it possible that you're confusing freedom of speech with forcing people to listen? As someone who makes his living based off of what he says, maybe he should be the one being careful.

Mozilla sells your privacy. You are their product, the browser's their bait. Microsoft sells a product. And your privacy. But they make most of their money off other stuff, selling your privacy is just their change jar.

It's all about motive. Now, some might wonder if someone who doesn't survive off selling your privacy will take better or worse care of it than someone who will die if anything happens to their access to your personal data, but I doubt very many think like that.

You can never clean up a system. MD5s help, but you know what one of the first things I'd do when rooting a system is? After making sure my rootkit didn't show up in directory listings, I'd patch md5, shasum, perl, and ruby to return the exact MD5 I wanted for every file I defined a magic string for.

You gonna catch me on some systems? Sure. You gonna catch me on an extremely common distro like Debian without installing out-of-tree software? Probably not.