Sorry, but it can't be summed up in six words.

It's easy to say that the republicans are in the pockets of some big company.

The Republicans and the Democrats are in the same people's pockets. If some big aerospace factories close, thousands of people lose jobs, and the local representative doesn't get re-elected. The difference between the Republican and the Democrat is that the Republican thinks it's the big company's responsibility to give those people a job, and the Democrat thinks it's the government's responsibility to make sure those workers don't need to worry about whether they have a job or not.

Bottom line, it's always about the voters. Except that most of our citizens of voting age are so cynical about the process, and think it's all about the "money/power/big companies/cronyism" that they stay home and dilute the real power base.

Get off your ass and go vote.

Better yet. Understand what the people you're voting for actually stand for before you go vote. Otherwise you'll be surprised when the guy you voted for to change things starts supporting revoking Miranda rights, and sends more troops to the wars you don't support, and keeps an infamous prison open, and supports off-shore drilling, and signs a massive health care welfare bill into law just like the last guy did, and generally acts like a re-incarnation of George W. Bush, even though the writing was on the wall before the election, and everybody who pointed it out was routinely censored by the internet community.

Your post is mostly spot on, however you blew it when you brought child mortality into the picture.

You see, Americans with "Cadillac Health Plans" have more coverage for fertility services than any other country in the world. Thus far more of our women who would be outside of normal child bearing age are able to get pregnant, and those pregnancies have higher complications.

The fact that we had *better* care than the rest of the world in that regard generated a lovely statistic to use to show how bad our health care is.

The new system will solve the problem though. Expensive and exotic fertility treatments will only be covered by highly taxed plans soon, and business that provided those plans will pick cheaper plans to avoid the tax. (This was, in fact, Obama's stated goal for the tax.) The expensive fertility treatments will go away. Women in their 40s will be less likely to get pregnant, and the child mortality rate will drop. We'll declare success!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/66/Income-curve-%2410k.png/600px-Income-curve-%2410k.png

I was going to reply to you saying that perhaps the average Slashdot reader was smarter than your average person.

Then I thought about what I was about to say.

And now I just think the people who voted "Chewbacca" could be "Really really fucking stupid" and then it all averages out.

Don't forget, nobody actually needs to be average. Almost everybody can be either significantly above or significantly below average. We've simply convinced ourselves that there is a Gaussian distribution and come up with ways to test people built on confirmation bias. Then we use a unit of measurement (IQ) that has the normal distribution built into the definition.

Fit a curve to a histogram of populations with annual salaries between $10k and $150k at $5k intervals. That's a much more realistic distribution.

My Intel X25-M on Newegg only cost $119.

You don't even need a computer to do those things, so that's a silly argument.

When I say they're worth it, I assume you're doing actual work with your PC. If you're just going for music, games and movies, get yourself an iPod and an XBox.

How much for a hard drive that's as fast as that $125 SSD?

The 1TB Seagate hard drive that I recently tested gets random 4k read rates in the ~1MB/second range. My 80GB Intel X25-M gets ~38MB/second.

That's about 40 times more performance for THE SAME PRICE!

Storage capacity is irrelevant in many situations.

A 40GB SSD is more than sufficient for your average manager/executive. They'd almost certainly prefer opening Outlook and Power Point in a tenth of the time it used to take to having an extra thousand gigabytes of unused space on their laptop.

The 80 GB drive I have in my system was the best upgrade I ever bought. Kernel compiles are crazy fast, and all of the media I need can be streamed off the network (sharing a single one of those 1.5TB drives with a dozen or so other people).

None. Fixed that for you too.

And every single one of them tells you up front what the total feature set is and which you get for your money.

Would you feel the same way about it if your enterprise software vendors didn't tell you about the other features until after you paid for what you thought was the complete product? Especially if the features were explicitly shaved off to cause just the right pain-point to wring some extra dollars out of you after you thought you already knew what the full cost of the solution was? After all, it's only a few extra bucks, and you can't get the money you already spent back now that you know some key feature is missing.

I didn't. But why are other people getting so upset by this? Easy answer. It's usually suspected that the developers of a game held bits back to sell them to you as add-ons later, but there was always plausible deniability. Buy putting the add-on right on the disc ahead of time, then selling it later as "post-release" content is a tacit admission of what could only be assumed before.

It's the difference between having a little bit of power, and rubbing your face in it.

Additionally, it means that you never know how much a whole game will cost. It says $59.99 on the package, but how much will they charge for the bits they decided to leave out? How many little pieces would they break them up into. I'll happily just not buy games like that. There are plenty of games on the market. None of them are good enough to put up with this stuff. (Nor are any of them good enough to 'pre-order'. If it's good enough to play, it'll be good enough to play a couple weeks after the release.)

Part of the announcement was that, yes, you will be able to play online with PC users.

Game 3 doesn't bring you to the logical conclusion you seem to be suspecting.

You create game 3 with an updated version of DRMX, and the crackers have a shell script that automatically cracks the game for them, and a relationship with the latest trendy reviewer to get the hacked copy out on the net a week before it's released.

Most insightful comment in the thread.

What are they going to do when they can't use this as proof that a pirated copy is a lost sale? Most of the people pirating these games are almost certainly 13-16 year old kids that don't have $60 to blow on a game anyway.

So, you have warm feelings about unions, 'cause a union forced your company to buy you equipment you didn't need for your job?

Have you ever heard of "Biting the hand that feeds you?"

Who's going to be the early adopter of that? You want to be the person stuck with the low-res neural implant when the new ones come out in 6-months?