FAT32 and NTFS are getting there...

Let me be the first to say that aviation doesn't use the metric system for speed or altitude measurements. You get your clearances in feet, and your speed restrictions in knots. (nautical miles per hour).. Deal with it.

This is a weird world we're living in. Microsoft is offering patent protection to an open source product to counter lawsuits by Apple, thereby increasing the viability of the open source platform to spite Apple's own platform, even though Microsoft also has a competing platform.

Well, I guess I still hate Apple, so.. go Microsoft!

Maybe after Steam gave an online mode to allow the military to use their stuff while deployed, the cheese eating surrender monkeys (it is a French company) decided to strike back by making an even worse arrangement for those who serve.

One extra thing I noticed also. If you disable javascript they weren't able to get any other info than user agent and http_accept strings.

So NoScript is good to use. Also in Opera you can do this by disabling global javascript and enabling it on per site basis.

The fact that people overreact to a perceived threat is not evidence that the threat is real. In my state, all pressurized gasses in cans are considered hazardous waste when used at a research institution. That means we can't even have reddi-whip at a department party without talking to EHS. Does this mean that reddi-whip isn't safe to use at home? Of course not.

You are over-blowing the risks. They are absolutely manageable. We have a lot more to worry about from people dumping paint-thinner down the drain than from DIY bio.

The last thing we want is for this douche-nozzle to have a legitimate complaint and win a lawsuit. Let him get laughed out of court, but don't give him more fodder.

Yet, most people can not play the games in the stores on their computers, because most people have computers which are old.

By "old" I mean something running XP with 256-512M of RAM and, if they're lucky, integrated ATI video - but it's most likely Intel crap. They might have a dualcore processor, but odds are it's late Pentium 4 or equivalent.

No, I don't think people with computers like this are "behind the curve". They're the average, and there are a fair number of what PC Magazine would call "power users" who have computers with specifications like those above.

Meanwhile, games like Fallout 3, Crysis, or even something like Red Alert 3 (1.5 years old) will not play on such a system. Hell, even "retro" games like (say) Deus Ex with higher quality textures or Max Payne will struggle on something like those - and those are 7+ years old. Those newer games will only be "just" playable on a $100 card on a fast, modern system (faster than Phenom).

I'd wager you'd be hard pressed to play most year-old games on a "high end" laptop or desktop from Dell/HP or similar, short of getting the top-end model. Like, in the $800+ ballpark.

Assume a Spherical Cow

I know of only two instances where I've ever definitely been infected with spyware. I don't do stupid things like downloading and running strange programs from third-party sites, so I think both infections were probably caused by a site exploiting a security hole in Internet Explorer, or in a plug-in like Adobe Acrobat or the Flash player. Both times, once I noticed I was infected, I got rid of the infection with Malwarebytes, but I don't know how much damage the spyware did in the meantime.

Malwarebytes is good software, but as you point out you don't know how much damage was done. Secondary infections can easily be missed, and many malware programs open your machine to further exploitation. As tired as the suggestion is, you needed to do what you did with your website: revert the machine to a known good backup of the system state, formatting first. Anything less and you *should* have that nagging doubt that you haven't actually cleaned everything up. There are ways to diminish the concern: inspecting the machine for unexpected packet flows, using anti-rootkit tool, etc... but only by formatting and restoring a know clean state or formatting and just restoring your data files will you be confident).

"That's the second thing that's wrong with it. It punishes success."

How right you are. We should return to the model where the failures pay for everything. Just rename the poor as peasants, set the various city, county, state and federal tax collectors up with cool names like the Baron, Duke and Lord and we will have returned to a classic system that didn't punish success.

Of course if that is too extreme, you could always try to be successful in a failed state. I hear that openings for local warlord are surprisingly common.

Where do I get all these magical digital freedoms? You make it sound like the Broadcast Flag and DMCA magically vanish with over the air transmission, and the content providers are going to sing Kumbaya with us as we rip their content in the ways we want to.

I have my doubts.