I already switched to MariaDB, along with Red Hat, Arch Linux, and most everyone else.

Exactly what happened to open office. We got a working fork, that is what everyone is going to use.

and just like OpenOffice became libre office, mysql became MariaDB.

Everyone saw the writing on the wall and switched to MariaDB a few months ago. In for a repeat show?

This is the great thing about free software, once its free, you have a hard time closing it back up. Someone just forks the last free version and keeps going, and you get ignored unless you can contribute something the Free versions don't, which is unlikely.

They are using publicly subsidized infrastructure on publicly owned land to seek rent on a network they are not investing in or improving.

That is the heart of the matter. They're so used to huge profits for next to no effort that the notion of giving customers value for their money never enters their mind. And they'd laugh at the suggestion of "invest in your own network".

There really needs to be some anti-trust cases brought against the biggest telecoms. Threaten to do to them what was done to AT&T decades ago. You'd see service improve everywhere in a big hurry.

aren't there laws against monopolistic practices?

There are but they were pretty well gutted back in the days of the Reagan Administration. Now, the ones that are left are mainly ignored. The big exceptions, like the Microsoft case, usually come as political punishment or when the infraction is so blatant that it cannot be ignored.

If we had a Justice Department that was more than a bunch of cronies and amateurs, there wouldn't be a single telecom with any interest in content providers, and there certainly would not have been any of the mega-mergers in the airline industry and others.

We haven't had a real Justice Department since before the days of Ed Meese. Meese is really the very model of the modern attorney general, who believes his main job is to make sure no rich people get in any trouble and to find ways to subvert the Constitution.

Replying to them and making it twice as visible that the word was used, does not further your cause. It does, however, let you show us that you're so much better and holier than them.

I don't like or agree with every term that everyone uses all the time myself. I just don't bitch about it. I don't tell others how they should express themselves because that's worse than any word they could use, and because I am not their lord and master. The only person I want to control is myself.

That this particular term "sheeple" gets so deeply and visibly under the skin of so many tells me something. It tells me that this word has power, that it's significant, that it must in fact do a very good job of connecting an ugly tendency with an ugly word. "Follower", "lemming", "droid", "trendy", "mindless automaton" etc. all describe the same thing, but for some reason it is the word "sheeple" that so many I'm-better-than-you types fixate on. That's all the more reason to use it.

If you believe that censorship is fundamentally wrong then you have two choices: 1) Be a hypocrite and pretend it's different when you do it, or 2) don't censor content on your own Web site either. This KWin maintainer is choosing the first option. What he doesn't seem to appreciate is easy enough to understand: if the trolls can cause him to abandon one of his core beliefs and make a hypocrite of himself, then that's a victory for the trolls and a defeat for himself. It reminds me of how certain nations respond to terrorism by eliminating freedoms -- if the terrorists want to do as much lasting harm as possible, then they must be delighted by that.

This near-obsession with treating government as a special case even when the discussion is about abstract principles is why you were confused. Government is only a special case when the discussion is about censorship via the legal system, because government is the only entity legally allowed to use force or threat of force to achieve its goals. A Web site operator isn't going to arrest a troll and throw him in jail so that just doesn't apply here. Said operator might, however, delete certain posts or ban certain users to effect censorship.

I think our society in general is losing the ability to think in terms of abstract principles (part of why privacy is eroding). This is why we have to rehash the same old "but but .. government!" discussion every single time censorship is mentioned regardless of context. It's a nearly indestructible meme it would seem. You will probably be fired if you tell your boss to go fuck himself and that, too, is a form of censorship. Anyway, this is like a GPL vs. BSD license discussion -- check the Slashdot archives and you'll find that every conceivable point and counterpoint has already been debated ad nauseum.

like the anti-nuclear acvitists phil zimmerman was trying to protect.

How dare someone critize government or corporate intrests. They might as well be blowing up buildings.

so there is something that runs natively on Linux, but not mac. LOL

just fucking run Linux.

pidgin is open source and does skype

They ran 2 (or likely 2 million) situations through some great combonator. In situation A, they don't phone home every 24 hours and more people can buy the box, but publishers get mad that they can't impose draconian DRM. In situation B, they do phone home every 24 hours and less people can buy the box, but the publishers are happier. Situation B made them more money in spite of losing them customers, so that's what they went with.

As symbolist already said, you are definitely giving Microsoft too much credit. I guarantee there's some team leader who came up with a great Powerpoint presentation on "always on" connectivity and it got kicked upstairs and then some C-level exec talked to a Hollywood exec at a party over a soup bowl full of coke and it became a "strategic" idea with "synergy" and "legs".

God, if they could only concentrate enough to hold "situation A" and "situation B" in their heads at the same time they might be more than a hated leviathan that even their most avid customers hate most of the time.

the creative ones buy macs....

The really creative ones build their own systems and roll their own kernels.

Considering you can pick up a video card with similar capability to the new consoles for around $150 there isn't a huge barrier to at least trying it.

If you can up that to about $200, you can get a video card that will let you see things in games that you'd never imagine in a console game.

Try this: play a little bit of Metro:Last Light on a PC with an nVidia 660 or better. It will blow your mind. It's like an entirely different game. I saw a few minutes of that game on a PS3 and couldn't believe how far degraded the game was on that system.

How's the used game market for PCs?

Great. I recently bought Saints Row Third for $4.99 on Steam.

Oh wait. That was a NEW game.

That's a fine job of redundantly restating my sentence while also pointing out the obvious.

That's the problem with this media-driven urge to view the entire world through the lens of group identity. It becomes a fixation, and people who allow their thought process to be a product of media will miss your clearly-stated point because of it.