Wow, defensive much?

In reality, most of those other apps could be used just fine with a seamless rdesktop or Citrix connection to a single Windows server. You may need Windows, but that doesn't mean you need it on every desk.

Many large organisations already use Citrix to access niche applications like this, instead of buying a license for every single desktop that might ever need to access them. Switching the underlying desktop to Linux is an option, and any public company that rules it out without even considering it is not doing their duty to their shareholders.

BASIC has one important advantage over Python.

BASIC is not a religion.

Sure, Python is a nicer language for writing modern programs in. But the cult-like fervor that many Python advocates tend to adopt, particularly whenever the subject of learning programming comes up, is frankly rather disturbing -- and certainly not something I would want any child of mine to be exposed to in an educational environment.

No sanely designed programming language will ever require you to label each line of code and throw and require the lines to be renumbered whenever you want to put new code in the middle.

Line numbering is actually not a bad way of introducing programming. It models a program as an explicit list of instructions, which is a decent metaphor for very simple programs.

Contrast something like Python, where the student is forced to worry about things like indentation before he even knows what a loop is, or Java, where the student is forced to copy huge chunks of class definition boilerplate before she has even grasped the concept of a variable.

I will agree that BASIC of the classic line-numbered sort is not suitable for learning to write real-world programs. But as a way to learn the basic concepts, it is arguably superior to "better" languages, precisely because it does not force you to learn about the structure of real programs just to make your computer do something interesting.

(Someone is about to point out that "hello world" in Python is a one-liner. Don't bother. "Hello world" is not a useful learning experience in the way that "20 GOTO 10" is.)

Enter vim, you rarely need to remove your fingers from the home row. ;)

Except, you know, every three seconds, unless you have remapped your keyboard so that the most important command in vim is not assigned to the far top left corner of the keyboard.

Either you trust the government : no choice of provider (that much, history should prove)
Or you trust business : you can choose (for a little more money probably, yes, deal with it) a better provider

...but you are trusting them to do different things.

I trust businesses to provide me with internet service. That's their job. The government isn't going to do it, nor should it.

I trust the government to regulate businesses to the extent necessary to make sure there is fair competition and the free market keeps on working. That's their job. If you believe the businesses will do it themselves -- will take actions specifically designed to ensure that new competitors can emerge and take customers away from them! -- then you are a fool.

I don't want the Internet to be regulated. It's a wonderful resource full of free speech and free information, and the government should keep its hands off it and not try to tell me which sites I can visit. But that's a different thing from wanting internet service to be regulated. I have absolutely no problem with the government telling Comcast to keep its hands off and not try to tell me which sites I can visit, either.

tl;dr: leave the web alone, but regulate the pipes.

It says something about the warped view people have on these issues that you have to swap it around male-female in order for anyone to even consider the matter sanely.

It's not entirely warped. Men face different consequences; for example, it's relatively rare for unwanted blowjobs to result in pregnancy.

After porn, it will be other harmful content, then wikileaks, then anyother site the government doesnt want you to get to.

The slippery slope fallacy seems strangely appealing to a certain class of Slashdotter.

Back in the real world, slippery slopes rarely go as far as the paranoid like to fantasise. For example, how exactly do you imagine a democratic government would go about blocking access to Wikileaks? That would mean declaring war on the mass media, which is not really a very promising tactic for any politician who wishes to be re-elected.

This is the same thing here on the Web with Anonymous, but even easier to manipulate and to fake as they operate under the cover of deeper level of anonymity. Same approach, same techniques, same motives.

Not so. The dynamic is totally different. A demonstration is basically a ruly mob, and can be subverted into an unruly mob; the thing is that its members are physically surrounded by other people, do not have time to think or easy access to relevant information, can only communicate with great difficulty and only with a handful of people, often literally cannot leave until the demonstration is over, and are going to be faced with physical responses that can cause them to experience fear or panic. None of this is true online, where participants can easily pause, think, research, discuss things with one another, and any one of them can directly challenge anyone they think is trying to subvert their activities.

In short, there is simply no realistic comparison between the situations, and online protests are much, much harder to manipulate.

Imagine if your electricity supplier charged a higher price if you plugged a PS3 in, or if your gas station charged more per gallon to fill up a Toyota.

Electricity is electricity. Gas is gas. Bits are bits. Service providers should provide the service and keep their damn noses out of what I choose to use it for. Charging based on the quantity I use is perfectly reasonable; charging based on the nature of that use is an unjustifiable violation of my privacy.

HTTPS would make these shenanigans significantly harder, because with HTTPS the data stream itself no longer contains the resource name in plain-text form.

And what's to stop them just charging extra for HTTPS packets? (Except maybe those going to major banks, who might pay the provider not to charge their customers.)

Yeah, there's no technical excuse for it, but the majority of Americans wouldn't know that.

Besides, you'd also have to go through a proxy to hide your true destination. That degrades your performance. They could also add something to the ToS banning the use of proxies. (Again, no technical excuse; again, they don't need one because they could easily convince the majority of their customers it made sense.)

So, each game company saw around $180,000.

Much of which came from people who would not otherwise have even heard of their games, let alone considered buying them at any price at all.

This is called "pure profit". It's generally considered a good thing regardless of quantity.

Why do you think people will pay anything if they don't have to?

59,174 people (and counting) have so far paid a total of $419,914.75 (and growing), even though they didn't have to.

Maybe we aren't all pirates after all.

That mantra is repeated over and over by OSS advocates almost like an incantation

I constantly see people claim that OSS advocates use this argument. I can't remember the last time I saw an actual OSS advocate actually using it.

Really you are fighting something of a straw man. Nobody with a clue has ever claimed that "many eyes" is some kind of magical guarantee of security. It is not news that high-profile OSS code can contain very serious flaws; just think of the Debian OpenSSL incident!

My only wish is that they make sure the world as a whole feels alive, like you are not the only person there

Oblivion actually made this worse by having NPCs discuss things the player had done; the overall effect was of a world where literally nothing happened apart from what the player did.

Then they went and did the exact same thing in Fallout 3, where the only news in the wasteland is whatever the player did recently.

No, it does not make me feel like the special Chosen Savior Of The World, Bethesda. It breaks the immersion and makes me think the game's world is full of boring lazy people who don't deserve to be saved.