He's monologuing. That's the downfall of every evil villain.

In this case, he's probably more of a rich, paranoid nutbag than anything. Innocent until proven guilty and all that, but he's not helping his case any and I'm not going to vouch for the authorities in Belize, either.

You had me at "terminate the spammers".

With a goddamn axe.

Valve isn't the problem here - they've been good about bringing their AAA content to Mac and keeping it supported. I expect that they will continue to do the same with Linux.

The problem is that they are the distributors (through Steam) for a bunch of publishers that aren't Mac friendly. However, this gives them a reason to change, if they want to. Some of them can't afford to, some of them just won't and some of them will even be dickbags about it.

A lot of those same publishers are willing to be completely mediocre in their support and decide that supporting Windows is enough. Valve apparently looked at the situation, said "Windows 8 WTF" and is moving to expand their offerings so that maybe one day they can laugh in Ballmer's balloon-shaped face.

> Then don't worry about it because the rate of error propagation due to aging for physical media is orders of magnitude greater than that of media stored on the Internet.

The rate of corporate revocation of access rights to cloud-based storage is much higher than the rate of bitrot at the moment. Amazon is awesome, but they won't be around forever. My Britney Spears collection (when I say Britney Spears, I mean King Crimson) will be safely enjoyed by my spawn, whereas I'm pretty sure my bad sci-fi novel collection won't be (no matter how you slice it).

If corporations have the same rights as people in our framework of laws, why should they not be subject to the same penalties, including the death penalty (in those jurisdictions that have it)? By limiting the liability of a corporation, you are placing a higher value on it's survival than an actual person.

Limited liability is fine, as long as the corporation is viewed as a collection of persons who can be held individually responsible for malfeasance, but the moment you equate the corporation to a person, in any sense, it should suffer the same consequences along with the privileges.

Your bias against whites is showing.

Thing is, those people who watch and wait aren't confined to one racial group. They're all over the place.

My bias is more against people who just want to be dicks.

Like you.

To an extent, I agree.

I find that electronic books are fine for throwaway fiction - books that, for whatever reason, will only be read and if they were lost, I wouldn't care. But for reference books, I prefer hard copies that I can browse thru at my leisure, leave open on a desk or quickly flip between sections.

The same goes for music. A lot of it is stuff that I'll listen to once or twice, but wouldn't miss it otherwise. For things that I want future generations to know about, I get a more permanent format.

We're scary close that situation now. A lot of people in the US live paycheck-to-paycheck without any real spare money to spend (yet they spend it anyway). It's not really the fault of the rich, it's more the fault of corporations who went nuts selling everyone credit and the fault of people who bought into that credit without thinking through the long term effects.

> Just treat everyone fairly, how hard is that?

Being fair isn't hugely difficult, but it's easier to raise an accusation of being unfair than it is to combat it. There are people who wait and watch and see intentional discrimination even where none exists.

There's no easy solution. Sometimes there is no spoon.

> I'm not sure if you follow PETA's actions very closely but the *sanity* has no bearing on PETA.

FTFY.

The New York Times got caught in the same filter that catches everyone else while posting in corporate forum. Their problem is that, for some misguided reason, they, being the NYT, believe that they have some sort of free speech rights in a private space. Facebook is not a public space - it's corporate-owned and controlled. It's private space, open to some members of the public to post in, but with whatever restrictions FB feels like applying.

Actually, after that period about 2000 years ago, Israel did not exist as a state until 1948 or so, when the UN (mainly the British and the Americans) forcibly set up a new Israel because none of the major countries wanted an influx of Jewish refugees. It played into the hands of the Zionists of the time, who were keen on setting up a new religious state on their prior home ground, and gathered support from Christians all over the place who were all agog over the messianic revelations in The Bible.

To say that the founding of the new Israeli state was anything but a religious and political clusterfuck of epic proportions is to just be in denial.

What we have now is an even bigger mess, because once Israel beats the crap out of it's neighbors (and it will eventually, for better or worse), they'll turn inward and start beating the crap out of each other in a bout of sectarian warfare that will make the current fight seem like a sandbox rumble.

Whether or not The Ribbon is a Good Thing is immaterial at this point. The point is that Microsoft put it there and if you want to beat Microsoft in the word processor game, you have to either have The Ribbon, the Not-Quite-A-Lawsuit-Ribbon-Replacement, or something that's just plain better (on both a usability and a marketing level). For individuals, who cares? It matters when you're trying to pass off your Microsoft-Word-Alternative.

The Ribbon is not the worst thing ever invented. I reserve that for everything that got tacked onto Word after v5.1 for the Mac, except maybe multi-column editing. Frankly, The Ribbon is only the smallest part of that mess now.

Seriously. Why do distros have to ship with every possible FOSS package under the sun? Why not let the user decide which packages to install after they get the base system installed?

A word processor is not necessary to make a working system, yet every bloody one of them ships with Open Office as part of the default install, which then costs time in removing it. If I want a word processor, I'll install it later.

Same thing with Steam. It's awesome that Valve is doing this, but at the same time, it's not necessary to a working system and the people that are actually interested in playing Valve-distributed games will make the necessary investment in downloading the installer as a separate package. There is no need to include Steam on any distro.

I don't even see ads anymore, thanks to ad blindness. They're easy enough to mentally block (except for the auto-expanders), that whatever they're selling doesn't really register.