The ability to abuse the system, when you can't uniquely identify people. (The sock-puppet dilemma.)

I wrote a long essay on this subject over at another (essentially failed) competitor to Slashdot.

I can't believe you repurposed content from my diary on kuro5hin about sybil attacks in order to karma whore yourself out on Slashdot. For shame!

I think you'll find this old Bob Hope movie clip about zombies apropos.

Well now that they have a right to privacy, at least they'll be protected by Roe v. Wade in case they ever decide to abort an unwanted subsidiary rather than spin it off as an independent corporate person.

Bud Light beat Microsoft to the concept of anal sex in advertising.

This is true, however, the generally accepted definition of "vendor lock-in" is useless.

The Enterprise doesn't care about vendor lock-in, they care about the consequences of vendor lock-in. That is to say, they care about what vendor lock-in might cost them. The cost of vendor lock-in is what it will cost you to change from your current system and what costs you might be forced to bear if you want to avoid that. Often this can be an issue of a company basically gouging their customers because they can't afford to get out, but it can just as easily be the costs of maintaining a project if the original maintainers disappear, or any number of other things.

Lock-in doesn't occur because software is closed or for any reasons of legality. There is no law which you can use to force someone to continue to use your software. Lock-in occurs because every piece of software is a little bit different and relearning a new one, adapting your other software to work with a new one, changing your business processes to match a new one, all of that costs an awful lot of money.

In a certain sense, Windows actually has less lock-in than Linux. You can nearly always install windows software on multiple versions of Windows, and the each version of Windows is supported for quite a long time. You can, for the most part(and I've certainly seen this) write a piece of software and run it, without any updates for 15 years. Whereas you can't even guarantee that any given piece of software for Linux will install and run the same way on the next version of the Linux software you're running, let along another distribution.

In any event, none of the four freedoms frees you from costs incurred if the people providing your software change the terms under which they do so. Just because you can maintain it yourself doesn't mean that it is in any way practical or even desirable to do so.

As an American, I would expect you to have a better knowledge of WWII history than what you displayed in your post. Turing was important to ULTRA, but all the real work in cracking Enigma was done by a team of three Poles who risked life and limb to escape both the Nazis and the Soviets to get their information to the allies. Without Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Róycki, and Henryk Zygalski, who cracked Enigma back in 1922, the British would have had to start Bletchley Park from scratch.

Let Turing be known as the father of computer science. Credit for cracking the Enigma goes to the Poles.

Perhaps a little less reflexive American-bashing self-righteousness would do you well.

You cannot give up your US citizenship because there is no legal and Constitutional way to do so.

Incorrect, Blastard. It says right in your passport that you can renounce your U.S. citizenship. The process is described on this friendly and helpful State Department webpage.

What they do with the weapons: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/world/americas/03venez.html?_r=1&hp
What violent games do: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/02/AR2008110202392.html

I've been browsing the web practically since there was one, and I rather like that I can type in a substring of the title of a page I visited yesterday but didn't think to bookmark or save the exact URL somewhere. I'm a human, it's not my job to remember URLs. Domain names sure, but URLs are the computer's job.

Everyone that I've heard complain about the awesomebar hates it because they only want URL auto-complete and are confused that it does more than they were expecting or are used to.

I wrote up a proposal for a passive solution to hiding porn results from the AwesomeBar, much in the same way that AdBlock Plus passively solves the problem of preventing ads from being displayed on websites: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/2/5/43412/24669

Apparently there are already hooks present in Firefox's userChrome that allow the user to specify, on a per URL basis, sites to be prevented from appearing in AwesomeBar results: http://ed.agadak.net/2009/02/hiding-history-with-userchrome

The old meters worked just fine!!

As someone who doesn't carry large amounts of change around, in my car or on my person, I have to say the new parking system does have the big benefit of accepting credit cards. I can pop in my credit card, charge $1.50 and get two hours of parking in Adams Morgan, Washington DC. If I had to pay in quarters every time, I would have to go to the bank regularly to buy $20 rolls of quarters and make sure I was always stocked up before visiting my girlfriend. With the new system, I don't have to worry about anything, except getting the meter paid in the morning before parking enforcement gets to my car...

People who are completely broke still get laid.

Yeah, but that's not the whole story. Wealthy men give women more orgasms.

L'Enfant designed the streets of Washington DC such that an invading or retreating army could easily be cut off by U.S. forces. Unfortunately, the effect has been to cut off the ability of invading and retreating legions of commuters to get to work/home in a reasonable amount of time.

I thought atheists defined $DEITY as localhost.

No, that's nihilists.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

—Nietzsche, The Gay Science