While I have no faith in Microsoft's honesty, I can see that they would have no reason to lie about this particular thing. If the 720 requires an Internet connection to function, there would be no way to hide that fact. They would get much better traction by spinning the requirement as a Good Thing(TM) than they would by denying its existence only to have the denial proven false in a matter of minutes.

That said, it's academic for the moment because the poster you replied to is wrong; Microsoft hasn't denied (or confirmed) an always-online requirement yet.

And a zip gun can be made easily enough by someone who really wants a gun, but doesn't have thousands of dollars for a 3-d printer, not the knowledge to print one.

The cost and knowledge barriers for building a zip gun are relatively static. Those same barriers for 3D printing are dropping rapidly. Within a decade, it will be easier and cheaper to print a gun than build one from scratch, and the end product will be much more reliable.

And while we're at it, we have the highest death-by-firearm rate in all of the first and second world

The cause of which is not guns. Violent crime is driven primarily by poverty and mental health issues; we need to be addressing those problems rather than waste time on crusades against inanimate objects.

go ahead, tell me Australia, or the UK, or France is less "free" than we are. Prove it.

Off the top of my head:
Australia's government takes it upon itself to decide what movies you can watch and games you can play. Note that Australia's constitution doesn't even name a right to free speech.
The UK's libel laws are notorious for the burden they place upon defendants. Even when the allegations are objectively, provably true.
France passed a law banning "any visible sign of religious affiliation". No points for guessing who that's really aimed at. But I'll give you a hint: it rhymes with "Buslims".

And then of course, you have good old Switzerland, with its high rate of gun ownership yet low rate of violent crime, refuting by virtue of its mere existence the simplistic assumption that guns create crime.

I propose manditorily treating guns *exactly* like cars, including licensing and insurance.

In CCW states, that is already the case. I'm sorry, did you think you needed a license just to own a car in the US?

Plastics have reduced the murder rate. Plastics have vastly improved medicine. With improved medicine you have decreased murder rates, because whenever surgery is performed to save a stabbing- or shooting-victim and a life is saved, there's one less murder.

Hang on...that means plastics have increased the rate of attempted murder! We have to ban plastics immediately!

and in a right to work state, they have the right to tell you your services are no longer required

The term you're thinking of is "at-will employment". Right-to-work is a different animal.

Yes it will, because not everyone's past is equally embarrassing, and there's always a reason why yours is worse. The "transparent society" idea is wishful thinking at best.

Even if quantum entanglement worked that way (it doesn't; that's just the most palatable way to present a concept that's too weird to understand without years of intense study), that doesn't change the facts. Relativity still means FTL communications would violate causality if they were possible.

While you might contemplate that something can be sent with a nearly infinite speed, no speed will be so great that the time since transmission is a negative number.

It's perfectly obvious that this is true. However, it actually isn't true at all.

Relativity is a mind fuck.

I'll see your biased newspaper article reporting on one term, and raise you a well-sourced scholarly article by a prominent Constitutional scholar.

Your move, junior.

No it isn't. Please do not repeat myths.

That's because AC is the path of least resistance. Get rid of AC posting, and those things won't go away, they'll just move to throwaway accounts.

I realize that the left tends to be more passionate about things, and uses their feelings to judge things, but it doesn't really serve society well.

Sorry, but that trait is not in any way particular to lefties. The right is every bit as guilty.

Confirmation of "could" does not equal speculation of "did". This is a pretty big deal.

Don't be a sore loser, kid.

Occasionally? Yes. Routinely? No. If you want to accuse me of lying, feel free to further embarrass yourself by trying (and inevitably failing) to show that free content was anywhere near as common as paid expansions.

Really? I don't remember anyone being upset with expansions, back in the day.

Then you either weren't paying attention or have forgotten to remove your rose-tinted glasses. Every time an expansion was announced, "everybody knew" that the publisher had deliberately made all this stuff along with the original game but withheld it so they could sell it separately later. It was all a big plot to make us pay half again what we "should" for our games. They were con artists who were stealing our money. And so on. It was bullshit then and it's bullshit now. Game publishers do shady things sometimes, but the existence of extra paid content isn't one of them, regardless of whether you buy it as a disc or as a download.

You got a shit-ton of additional content (practically an additional game) for like $20 or $30. It was substantial. It was a continuation of the game. Today, they're selling you packs of stronger guns for $5 or extra bullets for $2.50 or a prettier coat for $5. Or access to the online game for $10.

They sold those guns and coats back then, too. They were included in the expansion pack, and if you bought it then you paid for those things whether you wanted them or not. You either bought everything, or nothing. If you only cared about part of it, too bad - buy it all or go without. Now you have some granularity; you can just buy the new story content, or just buy the guns, or buy it all (usually at a price that comes out to about what a boxed expansion would have anyway).

DLC isn't a "different beast" than boxed expansions at all. It's the same thing done in a different way.

As for the online passes, that's a crappy thing to do. But not only is it not an indictment of DLC, it's not even an example of it. You're not "downloading" access to their servers.