>That's because the US isn't far from being a police state.

Wiki doesn't agree, and so to state as much illustrates the gulf between the put-upon and those who *think* they're put-upon. Very insulting for the former, who would quite rightly state that you're either unwilling or unable to look at *real* police states when complaining about your own.

>The point is that the law has become so over-reaching and "left to discretion" that it is indeed legal to detain a US citizen indefinitely without evidence or charge. Is that not a police state?

No, because having the option and it being commonplace are two different things.

I would suggest that the book (just based on that quote) is going to extraordinary lengths to present even the *suggestion* of interference by government lawmakers as indicative of a police state, which isn't the same thing. Does it mention any *real* police states, for example?

>Considering that everyone is always guilty of something, anyone can be legally arrested and convicted at discretion. Is that not a police state?

I'm sure residents of the more oppresive countries would have 100% sympathy for your hypothetical situation. Do you have examples of this happening en-masse? That this is the norm? I can find a grandfather that smoked until he was 90, but that doesn't mean smoking is safe - and ultimately you *don't* get to redefine what a police state is where there are so many other more serious examples in the world where they don't need Ron Paul to use it as a scare-mongering tactic.

>It's worth pointing out that the United States incarcerates NEARLY as many people as the entirety of rest of the world *combined*.

The vast majority of which aren't done illegally, so I'm not sure what your point is. You're not locking up political dissidents, for example, and your logic isn't accepted when people suggest that removing guns might help lower your murder rate.

More tellingly, look at the score I get (zero) for pointing out that the US is far from a police state and how this is provable via a lack of evidence in the wiki entry. Apparently, pointing out stuff that people appear to *not* want to be true isn't 'informative'.

And there I was thinking the only hivemind was on reddit.

Only problem there is that we've been supposedly moving 'into a police state' for longer than we've known about global warming. Ron Paul was suggesting that 'a police state is close' in 2002, and the wiki entry for Police State gives a single example for the US - that quote I just listed (last time I checked, anyways).

That's the trouble with mentioning the term every time something *might* lead to it, regardless of how long a stretch of the imagination it requires. I'm starting to think we need a 'Ron Paul's Law' for police states similar to Godwin's Law when Nazis are mentioned, because it really is insulting to those that *do* live under them. You may as well bitch that the USA is starving.

,,,,when single-machine people that aren't interested in Metro look for what other 'features' are in Win8 and find that there are so few that MS have to list 'app store' as something you're supposed to want to pay for.

For the corporate side - I've done three UAT's at big sites, and each one featured a near 100% rejection of the UI. The main comments included "Why can't we have both?", "Why do I need this when I don't use a tablet or MS mobile?"...and one that was the best summary I've seen so far - "Are we going to wait for Windows 9 while they figure out what they're doing?".

Server 2012 may be fine and dandy, but the real crunch will be how well it works with Win7 clients - because nobody's going to care what advantages Win8 has if Metro is the price. And that's before we get to the Metro subsystem no-one needs either.

...there's still time for MS to consider that we're quite aware that they could sell Metro as a standalone app if it was so fantastic that everyone would buy it. Well, y'know, if everyone was using the hardware it's designed for...to say nothing of making it appear that the past seventeen years of Start-button UI development has apparently been going nowhere now that we apparently can't cope with two different ones.

And even ignoring Metro - what's in Win8 for the single-machine user? The list of truly minor improvements described as 'features' is embarassing - for example; an app store? Thank you MS, I'm so glad I paid for this! Faster bootup? Buy an SSD, it'll cost a third of the price. There isn't a single must-have feature. It doesn't even have a new DirectX to tempt the gamers.

Roll on Win9 with its 'because we listened' UI.

...tell us about how this is all stupid, crime will go up, guns don't kill people people do, those poor victims if only they had a gun, make half a dozen excuses for your gun-related crime rates being so stupidly high, how people will keep their guns anyway despite not addressing that just owning one will now be a risk.

Oh, darn, you've all beaten me to it. The funny part? You all seem to think that Team America is about *everyone else*.

lots of comments from people *insisting* that there's no difference.

TV's upscale low-res (standard) broadcasts to 1080 - does the resulting picture look hi-def? No. Does it look better than directly displaying the lower-res? Yes.

At this point, whether the upscaled picture looks as good as 1080 is irrelevant - it just looks better than if you'd displayed the low-res picture without any processing.

Do you then complain endlessly about how it's not actually 1080? Apparently, lots of the posters here would.

Is Obama on the phone to that Solider every single day? Brooks was with Murdoch, despite Murdoch stating that he kept out of things.At this point, we're into Murdoch proving this - which, of course, he can't.

Does Obama have a son that he's placed in charge, who stated that he didn't remember paying off a football manager to the tune of £750,000?

You really need to start reading Private Eye before defending Rupert Murdoch. Next you'll be saying that Piers Morgan is an upstanding member of the community.

WC had mouse control in from at least 4, and very good it was too.

But wait - shall I go upstairs and dust off the Sidewinder Force-Feedback, my only joystick? No, I won't - it's MIDI based, and so won't work under Win7.

So, shall I play it using the keyboard? Errr....no, think I'll play something else.

I suspect this pattern will be repeated by many.

Next it'll no doubt transpire that most states don't recognise gay marriage or even civil partnerships....oh.

You do realize that in the 80's, PC's cost so much that your chances as a child of playing on one were pretty much zero, right? Why do you think there was an explosion of home computers that cost between 30 and 10% of the price of a PC?

In any case, that's not the point - the innovation (as listed) was far, far superior on the home computers than on Apples or IBM's - ridiculously so, in fact, hence my amazement that Slashdot would link to such a bad article. The fact that 'Starflight' is included is akin to saying that the 70's Battlestar Galactica movie was responsible for the Sci-Fi movie exposion; most people have at least *heard* of Elite; certainly people that want to write articles about classic games without looking ignorant (which this guy has managed to do with aplomb).

This has been written either by someone's Dad, or someone that wasn't around at the time.

Any list of games that has to include Apple entries has to be getting *something* wrong simply because of the overwhelming number of games for the ZX-81, ZX Spectrum, VIC-20, C64, Amiga and Atari ST (the latter two only getting a couple of mentions in this list makes it even worse)

Let's start with 'Starflight' by EA just happening to look like an exact copy of Elite, the *original* 3D spaceflight/ dogfight/ trading game. Or for adventures, Knight Lore on the Spectrum *invented* the 45 degree/ isometric view, but doesn't get a mention either.

Maybe this list should be titled "Games your Dad would have been playing in the 80's", with a proviso that no actual journalism was involved in the making of this article.

"The new screens held!"

I think (as a server-bod of twenty years) that without a disable-by-group-policy option, most corps are going to skip this one.

Yup, that would work too - but I'm not so sure about reducing employment locally just so we can force other countries to wake up; how about a combination, where we refuse to import the raw materials from countries that don't toe the line?

They then still get exports, we still get a manufacturing industry.