The difference is, you can't do much to force them to pay up, while they can cut off your internet access (and your livelihood) to get *you* to pay up.

And if you don't do that, but some twats claim you are doing it or their shitty system has a false-positive, you can pay for something you didn't do or lose a vital service.

I'm fine with them doing this. Once they have taken you to court and received a judgement in their favor against you.

This is the new media. Clearly label satire; obfuscate native advertising.

Because, Slashdot desperately wants to be the new Gizmodo, Engadget, and The Verge. Stay tuned for tomorrow's big posting about another shitty cell phone update.

Would you do it if they were reading comic books about war? Watching movies? Watching 50s movies with John Wayne about war? Reading novels about war? Playing war in the yard? If they started playing cops and robbers in the back yard with the neighbor kids, is it time to haul them off to a Scared Straight session at a prison, to impress upon them the harsh realities of a life of crime?

This whole story is a tale of over-reaction that only seemed to have occurred, because "oh my god, video games!".

Wanting to expose your children to realities beyond those as depicted by popular media is a thoughtful thing to do. Not so much when it's a swift over-reaction to "OMG VIDEO GAMES!".

And, really, the truth seems more to be "freelance journalist does a freelance journalist thing and uses his kids as fodder for more freelance journalism". What do you figure the odds are he'd be doing this and documenting it if, say, he were a flight mechanic or a plumber and there weren't some other benefit besides that to his children?

Trolls are like Bullies. They are whatever you say they are. And what you say they are is whatever you personally have an issue with to promote your personal agenda. (Not "you", but the royal "you").

It sounds, to me, like the father has an issue of his own with discerning reality from fantasy and fiction.

I think the more bots using twitter, the better it would be for the stock. I tried following some people on twitter for awhile and even the most interesting and intelligent had feeds that were largely repetitive and self-absorbed or served to do nothing but mindlessly parrot the common attitude about any given topic that the poster had no clue about. I don't need a twitter update every time you post a picture of your kid to facebook, which I don't use because I don't want to see stupid pictures of your family in the first place.

If twitter dumped all humans and became just the pipeline for automated short message systems that facilitated interactivity between disparate applications and services around the web, it would be far more interesting and useful and that is something I'd invest in.

Nope. Not in the least.

When I see NGO after an organization's name, my assumption is that their source of funding is shady and that their actual purpose other than that which they position to the public, because that is often the case.

It's important to say "NGO" the same way it is important to say that your PAC is not directly endorsed or paid for by the candidate or cause it is supporting. Obfuscation and deniability. They aren't a government organization, but they're not a private organization, either -- yet they are funded *by* governments, businesses, other organizations, and people. And... there are something like two million of them in the US alone.

No, I'm making the distinction between the technical people and get-rich-quick snake-oil scum who happen to have chosen the current popular field to scheme in.

Granted, I don't come here much anymore, but . . . seeing the top post on the front page being about an updated cell phone style change makes one wonder if they've accidentally stumbled upon gdgt.com, engadget, gizmodo, twit.tv, or cnet, instead of slashdot.

Can we, perhaps, not refer to the entire tech community as one thing? Let's have the tech community, and then have the community that makes parking space auctioning apps, social websites, and "break-through" instant messaging apps who think they're on par with Tim Berners-Lee or Packard or Wozniak, because they made an iphone app where you can leave reviews for your favorite pigeon feeding seat in the park.

Fortunately, abundant litigation when dealing with US employees will surely make them want to hire more US employees, in the future.

I would be satisfied just in knowing that there is a branch of the service called SPACE MARINES.