you spend years making games that bomb until you hit on one idea that works and that clicks with people.

Basically, years of honing your game design skills and trying new ideas and then someone comes along and copies your mechanics and your game is irrelevant just like that.

I really don't understand why people hate targeted ads so much. Sure they might miss the mark.

I care about the covert surveillance which enables targeted ads.

I care about powerful corporate and political interests attempting to manipulate my decisions. That's nothing less than mind control, black magic.

The ads themselves? Adblock Plus removes them from my sight anyway.

It IS about race, you stupid fucking racist. Brown wasn't a thug, he had never been in trouble with the law and was enrolled in college to learn engineering.

The protests started peaceful, and only turned into rioting when the idiotic, racist Ferguson police acted like the racist morons they are.

People (and I use that word grudgingly) like you are the problem. I'm a white man who grew up in the St Louis area, and can tell you from experience that Missouri is indeed the most racist state in the union.

Those connections are wonderful, where they are available (typically on in town, go even a couple miles outside and your choices are pretty much crap BT. No different than in the States. I live in Tampa now and enjoy a 100/65mbit for the same price I was paying in England for the garbage ADLS connection six years ago. 100/65 is not even their fastest offering, but again go a little to far out of town and your choices stink.

Also, we don't have to suffer truly godawful ISPs, the way you do in the US, which is nice.

cough cough....BT...cough.

P> Look up BT in the dictionary and you'll get the definition of "truly godawful"

You do realize that settlements are basically private contracts right?

There is no such thing as a "private contract". A contract, by nature, is an agreement that the state will enforce. State actions are not private. If two people make an agreement and will never disclose that agreement to anyone else under any circumstances, then a court will never see it, and it is in no meaningful way a contract.

Of course that only goes double when one of the parties is a government agency. Nothing a government agency does is private.

But I shouldn't be forced to hire them or make them my friends.

No one is forcing you to make anyone your friend.

Commerce, on the other hand, by its nature involves the state. (At least beyond the trivial. Your lemonade stand generally flies under the radar here.)

If you want the state to issue a charter for your corporation or register your partnership, if you want to call the cops to use force against people your want removed from your place of business, if you want the government to enforce your business contracts, if you want to engage in interstate commerce and use the economic infrastructure that the state has created, you don't get to complain that the state is interfering with your "private choices" when it requires that your business not be racist, sexist, etc.

1. Censorship only applies to governments.

No. It doesn't. "censor...To review in order to remove objectionable content from correspondence or public media, either by legal criteria or with discretionary powers".

Please stop spreading the mis-definition that claims that private interests with control over information flow cannot engage in censorship.

A website or a store deciding that they do to carry a product is not.

If they decide "we won't carry this because our customers won't buy this", it's not censorship. If they decide "we won't carry this because we object to it", it is censorship.

I sure as fuck chose my lifestyle, thanks. Three bad engagements to women, and I made up my mind to date men after that.

Sounds like you're a bisexual person who made a choice to date only men. Ok, fine. Congratulations, even. But most of us could no more choose which gender to date, and to be sexually attracted to, than we could choose which sort of music we like.

I would go nuts if a "buy it now" button popped up while reading fiction, but this is a newspaper article.

When newspaper articles are written so as to be conducive to advertizing, they are fiction of the worst sort.

Three anonymous racists trolls in one JE. Brown probably had a slashdot account, the kid was a nerd. He'd just graduated high school and was enrolled in college to study engineering. He'd never been in any trouble with the police, and those who knew him said he was a peaceful young man with a good sense of humor.

Now heartless racists, like the Ferguson police chief, are trying to demonize him.

This hits close to home for me, I have family and friends in the St Louis area and grew up in Cahokia. And yes, there are a lot of racists there. Idiots, if you ask me. The Ferguson government was the stupidest of all, they were begging for riots and still are.