You realize that by "military leaders", they mean, like, the people on the Sunday morning news programs, and not a bunch of NCOs, right?

The military leaders we're talking about are either Obama appointees or serve in their role because of the approval of Obama appointees. The law was written that way to try to quiet McCain's whining about micromanaging the military (I fucking wish we did), not to be functionally different from an outright ban.

Shit, I rescind my clearly inferior post saying basically the same thing you just did. :)

It was less homophobic than what happened before DADT (where the government would investigate people to find out if they were gay).

Don't Ask, Don't Tell kept the rule on the books but removed the ability for the military to do any proactive investigating. It was a midpoint compromise that sucked. (Like desegregating the military but not the civilian federal government, back in the 1940s.) Clinton wasn't very happy about it and originally wanted to repeal the ban altogether but would have had maybe ten votes for that.

You're maybe forgetting how homophobic 1993 still was. It wasn't until a few years after that Ellen DeGeneres could refer to herself as a lesbian on TV without getting banned by the network.

We probably will have another president that homophobic, but after years of out gays and lesbians serving, fighting, and moving up through the ranks, there would be no inertia whatsoever to kick people out, especially all at once.

One more thing: The Mississippi and Missouri rivers would effectively be useless for shipping anything through the Gulf because the South planned on either banning or taxing the shit out of everything coming from the North down the Mississippi. Yes, there was rail, but barges are dead simple and cheap, and getting things to New Orleans from the Midwest or Plains was a hell of a lot easier than rail to the Atlantic. So, big economic inefficiencies just as the US was starting to be a global power. (Of course, we wouldn't be a global power as easily with half the land and no cotton.)

The northern states would probably be better off, on paper at least, all other things being equal.

The southern states themselves, and oh yeah, all the black people inside of them? Not so much.
Also, there would have been multiple civil wars. Do you really think the USA and CSA would have come to a nice, happy agreement on who gets to have California, Kansas, the Interior West, etc?
And, the South had plans of aggressively taking Spanish and French territories in the Caribbean that would have likely resulted in British intervention. Remember, they were rooting for the Confederates partly because they were banking on the Southern states being too fragmented to form a union, and then Britain's got colonies again. So, proto-World War opportunities there, plus an outside chance of Spain or France (especially France) grabbing some pieces of land in the South again if the wars went badly. Not good for the USA.

Finally, the slave states that remained in the Union would have had widespread rioting and private militias backed by former slaveholders, who saw slavery banned in 1863. They would have wanted to join the Confederacy. Basically, guerrilla warfare in Baltimore and St. Louis.

Still sound like a sweet deal for the Union?

While this is true, it's true of plenty of other software, and they make it pretty clear what's going on and what they send. Hell, they named it SpyNet!

For those not able to check right now, it sends: Where the malware came from, what you chose to do or what MSE did for you, (ignore/quarantine/delete), and whether it worked. Yes, sending that info might get personal data as collateral damage (they'll know you downloaded preteenbj.exe, and probably the file path), but that is by no means a new level of information sharing for automated info dumps.

Worth noting that MsMpEng is truly just "sitting there", unlike Norton or McAfee (or even the good guys like Avast) where there's random, unneeded churn. The only time so far I've seen it have any CPU usage was when I tried to close it with Task Manager and MSE popped up a warning asking me to restart the service.

My (mid-range) laptop is only a year old, but I can say that I notice no difference between MSE 2 and MSE 1 for speed, either while scanning or while lurking in the background. So, I'd say go for it.

Thank you. I use easy passwords all the time for crap like this. Why waste one of my strong but easy-for-me-to-remember passwords on something that doesn't actually have any connection to my personal life or my money?

And by "a few", I mean "I'm pretty sure I was using a pirated copy of Windows 2000 on my blazing-fast PC".

I thought I had hot plugged in Windows too, but that would have been a few years ago, and I remember it only sometimes working. Does anyone else know?

If it got as bad as I hypothesized, $200/month internet, I'd have to seriously consider switching back to dialup.

And in areas with true monopolies (in reality, I think the majority of the USA sees one single cable provider and several slow DSL providers) I think there would be enough people put off by that price that it would become economically feasible for a second or third competitor to enter the marketplace, or for those DSL providers to mature a bit and start offering cable-style speeds at more realistic prices.

In the end, I really think most cable companies will resist the temptation to charge per byte so that they can ensure they continue having a monopoly.

And actually, even then I fell for a red herring. Your ISP must only provide access to servers based in your state. Goodbye, backbone.

No, but your paying for it does. Unless you only use an ISP based in your state to access DNS servers in your state to access websites hosted in your state. And even then, it's not likely (my first jump via tracert goes to Illinois, and I live in Wisconsin).