> I don't really see how they think they can prevent people

That's easy:

Only cowards use censorship.

You are looking at just wealth and wages. In terms of the variation between the quality of abode, the standard of healthcare and the life expectancy of the poorest and the richest things have been improving. Thatcher and Regan did a lot of damage but the baseline is still way above where it was 100 years ago.

The problem with PC games is the horrible, horrible DRM. At least with a console's DRM you know what you are getting and it doesn't break the machine. With PC game DRM often you get a rootkit and sometimes your machine doesn't boot after installation. They force you to join some stupid "rockstar social club" and won't let you play if you have DVD duplication software installed.

Virgin Media recently had a five day outage round here, and my boss was telling me that his kids went nuts. No cable TV, no cable internet. At least they had their XBOX 360 to play with...

You'd be surprised. My brother lives in one of the most densely populated cities in the UK but doesn't have broadband. He could get it but doesn't want to pay for it when he can just tether his phone and rely on his data contract. I'm sure there are lots of young people like him who want an XBone but don't want to commit to a monthly contract due to job insecurity and a desire to limit their fixed outgoings.

It's not so bad on Steam because AAA games get down to £4.99 within a year or two so loss of resale value and actual ownership rights isn't so big a deal. I'd certainly never pay full price for something on there though.

Many gamers are kids. They have limited income, there is only so much MS and publishers can bleed them. They buy a lot of second hand games and always trade in the ones they finish. Those kids will be buying a PS4.

Some people will just put up with it and shell out the cash. Some people don't have that choice.

Society has been getting steadily more equal since the industrial revolution and the slow abandonment of religion in favour of science.

It's their right to disconnect the servers any time they want. They sell you the product without hiding that fact. If you don't want the product, you don't buy it.

Crying 'consumer rights' for a product that is sold with a publicly known 'always on' feature is like wanting to enforce your own policy on the publisher.

Guess what? it will not happen. Just don't buy those games.

At least astronauts won't have ring around the collar.

Can't IBM just buy the puny shell of SCO, fire everybody, and burn their desks, motivation posters, and Newton's Cradles publicly in a giant bonfire while singing Nah Nah Nah Goodbye?

You will never fully understand the code just by reading it...Tweak it some more. See what breaks.

Aaah, the Toddler Method of learning. Just keep that copy in the sand-box, please.
 

It's not going to change all at once. Keep voting for the most viable and most liberal candidate and you'll gradually shift the country away from the current corporate run mess. Obama is one of the most liberal candidate in 20 years. Short of Alan Grayson I don't know anyone else who has a chance in politics and would be a better pick. As for what changed? If the Affordable care act is properly implemented it will change the face of health care. That's important, because right now seniors are single issue voters afraid of losing their lives. Take that fear away and we can start getting them to vote for things like banking reform.

Baby steps. You're up against professionals who's only goal is to bleed you dry if everything. But they lost once (after WWII). For example, Britain told Churchill to talk a long walk off a short pier on the NSA. So if they lost once they can lose again.

In all seriousness it can help to find out what books he read and thus what bullshit design paradigms he was into. Also try to get his username on Stack Overflow so you can find all is questions to get an overview of the development process and the challenges he faced.

"A lot of us saw the dawn of the information age as the potential for a second Enlightenment, when a universally free flow of ideas and wisdom would lift mankind as a whole into an era of freedom and prosperity. Universal education and information was going to save humanity. Silly us. All we really did was give the despots more tools."

A lot of bad stuff is probably going to go down, true. But, we can remain hopeful good things will happen too. See Howard Zinn, for example:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
    To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth."

I watched that great video on "In the Year 2525" and am writing this on a US$250 Chromebook. Maybe it is not the best tool for covert browsing or communications like, say, "Freedombox" aspires to (for what that might be worth), but this cheap Chromebook is a great tool for learning. It would have been (almost) unbelievable in the 1950s. Ask yourself, as far as content learning goes, if you are a curious intellectually-inclined young person today, would you rather have had an expensive 1980s Princeton education with access to Firestone library (as I got), or just one year with a $250 Chromebook with acess to the 2013 internet for effortlessly following link after link and reading endless discussions on any topic you find interesting? If I was young again, I'd pick the Chromebook. An Ivy league education may have other benefits, as do face-to-face communities, but cheap access to endless information for those inclined to soak it up is now a reality -- and it is affordable for more and more people on the planet (including through discarded last generation smartphones). Another example, from India:
http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/

I followed your link. Now, please humor me and read "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (a sci-fi short story from the 1950s) to see what the internet and cheap mobile computing may still make possible. That story may help rekindle your optimism for what broad global education may make possible. It is available online here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PA51

Even stuff like more people learning about the idea of a basic income may make a huge difference over the next ten years...
http://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/comments/1gd0q7/krugman_endorses_universal_basic_income/

Yes, the USA may be relatively fading (including from thirty years of Neo-Liberalism and stuff like creeping surveillance and fearful self-destructive paranoia).
"Neoliberalism as a Water Balloon"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIUWZnnHz2g
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

But, the Earth overall is potentially brightening, and beyond that await the asteroids and the stars:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html

My own efforts to prevent the future depicted in "Elysium":
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

Still, as Bucky Fuller said: whether it will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end.