Indeed, exile used to be a relatively common punishment for misfits and others who pissed off the state.

If you think the medical support is expensive, take a look at what it costs to run police, courtrooms, and prisons.

Which by the way, how has drug prohibition stopped those people from obtaining and using drugs? Oh yeah, it didn't. So we'd have the same situation we have today, except without the astronomical costs of futilely trying to stop it. We would come out ahead. This is simple.

Most people simply don't want to practice polygamy. If they do, that's not my business and it's not my job to stop them.

Both myself and my significant other want a one-on-one, monogamous relationship. Let's say a home down the street has a polygamist family. Polygamy is the only usual thing they do; everything else is quite normal. All members of that home understand what polygamy is and have entered into the arrangement willingly. In what way are they harming you or me? On what grounds would you use the police power of government (force, guns, threats of force) to stop them?

There is no answer to that question that makes sense. There are lots of "I want to force, at the point of a government gun, other people to live the way I live" type of reasons. Those make no sense; they're just an egotistical fantasy.

You failed to explain why you consider this problematic. It works better than nit-picking semantics. I read your link and it sounds like everyone involved consented. So long as no one was ever forced to participate, I don't see the problem here. If you think what they did was fucked up (and I agree, it is) then all you have to do is not knock on their door and ask to participate. Isn't that simple? They got to choose and you get to choose, which is something actual victims don't get to do. I realize the state loves an excuse to use force, but there is no actual crime here.

So then: what activity among consenting adults do you believe would damage society and in what way would that damage occur? Note, the moment third parties are affected you fail the "consenting adults" criteria. (I.e. Drinking? Fine. Driving drunk? No, because now you are endangering others who did not consent to be endangered. That is a crime and deserves to be treated as such.)

The real solution to that is ending the War on Drugs and finally recognizing that anything consenting adults want to do is NOT a crime. Nice joke, though.

That's exactly what DRM is designed to do. By putting up with it, you are subsidising your own restrictions.

Anything else amounts to expecting the gaming corporations to act against their own profit motives. If they can tempt you into accepting unreasonable restrictions with the latest shiny, they will. If they can either kill off or control the used games markets, they will. These things make them more money. It's just that simple.

Anyone who purchases DRM'ed titles and complains about this needs to take a long look into the mirror. Expecting goodwill from these corporations is madness. They view you in much the same way that coal companies view the mines. You're a resource to be tapped. What's right and wrong to these sociopaths is whatever you'll bend over and take. I mean, this should be easy: we are talking about gaming systems here, not food and water. The slightest discipline means you prevail and *they* bend over and take it because their alternative is going out of business.

The situation is downright pitiful. I think the executives see it this way as well, which is why they feel completely justified in their exploitation. They feel completely justified taking advantage because it's what so many people want (or don't care about) and are willing to pay for.

Neither will I.

If there are advertisements, then the hardware and games should be free. If the user is paying for the hardware and games, there should be no advertisements.

I have this distant hope that gamers will learn the lesson taught to us by cable TV. Originally cable TV was ad-free on the basis that you were paying a fee for it. Then ads were introduced and for some reason, viewers tolerated it. They grabbed their ankles and took it just like they typically do, so cable TV ads became firmly entrenched.

Gamers, the same thing will happen to you if you put up with this. There can be no doubt about it.

That's the way it's supposed to be, yes. Unfortunately our politicians long ago discovered that divide-and-conquer can easily be implemented by pitting various groups against each other while promising to protect each from the others. This is why the USA has a collective unhealthy obsession with group identity. It's always black vs. white, rich vs. poor, Muslim vs. Christian, homosexual vs. heterosexual, etc. etc. Individuality is given only lip service by comparison.

This malignant design has been sadly successful. It has one primary goal and one secondary goal. The secondary goal is to herd voters into blocs that can be reliabily depended upon to maintain the ridiculously high incumbency rate. The primary goal is to conceal the one true division: the ruling class vs. everyone else.

We manage to have that problem despite our genetic diversity because we have so precious little diversity of philosophy and viewpoint. The decline of federalism and the establishment of a very powerful central government sealed the deal. Now we have lots of people who look different but think in the same way. Cosmetically that's great. In every other way it's more of the same old status quo.

You'll find that average Americans tend to be much more provincial than, say, the average European. Mainstream Americans usually speak only one language and don't visit foreign countries nearly as often as mainstream Europeans.

You know what REALLY discourages people from getting involved? The inability of most people to hire lots of lawyers and lobbyists which, when the media so grossly fails to do its job, is the only way things actually get done in Washington.

This simply cannot be rated highly enough.

Your perspective is that of an adult who is able to deal with reality. Those complaining that it's somehow "not nice" to expect real answers from people who are our servants and routinely act against our interests have some serious growing up to do. If everything the NSA did were acceptable and beneficial, these wouldn't be "uncomfortable" questions. It just can't be that hard to understand.

We're being transformed into a nation of pussies who can't deal with reality unless it's brought down to a child's emotional level, dumbed down to about a 5th-grade reading level (not a joke - the media targets this), condensed into 10-second sound bites to suit the prevailing attention span, spoon-fed, and guaranteed never to offend the most irrational and overreactive among us.

You can blame Wall Street, megacorps, sociopaths in government, and the like, but those are opportunists who saw a weakness and ruthlessly exploited it. The truth is, the nation is losing its prosperity because it is no longer worthy of it. For all the people who like to put on a big show this time of year concerning how fashionably patriotic they are, so few are actually looking for the root of our problems.

That fails to explain why the productivity of American workers has steadily increased for half a century while wages have remained stagnant. This fact is simple and easy to understand -- we are producing more and earning less. Somebody's getting screwed and it's us. Don't let this become obfuscated in all the phoney controversy.

Security is like a game of chess between two or more people. It's not a game of a person against a machine.

The nice thing about Linux is that any sane configuration means you aren't going to worry about a Web site doing a drive-by installation of malware. That does not mean a skilled and determined attacker couldn't penetrate it.

Corporate users of anything should be letting IT deal with security (and follow IT's policies) and focus on doing their jobs. Also, the kexec syscall means it really is possible to avoid rebooting a server for two years while continuing to keep the kernel and userland software up-to-date, not to mention that large organizations tend to have multiple redundant servers so that a few can be rebooted at a time while maintaining availability. If you're talking about a single physical machine running a two-year-old kernel, and connected to the Internet, then yes that's just asking for trouble. Linux sadly isn't the first magical idiot-poof system. It just doesn't try to be which is more than I can say for Windows.

I seriously doubt that Joe Sixpack goes running to Slashdot for advice on which OS to purchase. Joe Sixpack just uses whatever comes with his new computer. If the latest shiniest Windows sales are down it's because desktop computer sales in general are down. Making Windows go faster is no longer the prime reason to buy a new machine like it was when we referred to it as Wintel.

I did briefly try Win 7 because it came with a then-new laptop I purchased. I was impressed, actually. For Windows, it was great. For Windows, anyway. Sadly, copyright issues alone would prevent MS from ever offering a comprehensive centralized package manager comparable to what Linux distros offer. Having to track down hardware drivers (at all, ever) is a nuisance. Being treated like a dumb user at every turn is definitely a nuisance. The fact that good relatively common-sense security practices are not enough to prevent malware is a showstopper for me. Not being able to poke around under the hood and configure damned near everything, well that sucks. So little choice in desktop environments sucks too. Needing additional software to do what are nowadays basic things (like GOOD remote access, a compiler, etc) that are standard features on *nix is a nuisance. PowerShell is too little, too late compared to what Bash and its predecessors have done for decades (!) now. A binary registry is simply a bad design decision. And while you may find some sense of community among other Windows users, you will not share that with the people who actually put it together.

Slashdot users are more likely to care about some, or all of these things, or something along the lines, than the mass market that drives Windows sales. Here, you may have a point. But every last Slashdotter could boycott Windows forever and it would be a rounding error in terms of MS sales figures. That doesn't explain why Win 7 hasn't skyrocketed the way XP did. It's either ignorant or dishonest for you to pretend that it does.

This is a complete slow-news-day non-story. It's just a more specific way of saying "nothing lasts forever".

The headline should have been "Nothing Lasts Forever and XP Won't Be the First Exception" or maybe "For-Profit Corporation Doesn't Want to Support Dying Platform". Not exactly surprising, informative, or newsworthy.

And the fact that giving MS more money is the way out of said situation is a complete and total coincidence that could not possibly have been planned that way. Not even when you consider they have a long history of doing the same thing with Office and document formats, among other examples.

Would you like to buy a bridge from me?

If you seriously investigate the official explanation for how those buildings collapsed, particularly Building 7 which was never struck by a plane, you will see on your own that there are far too many things that just don't add up. If a shoddy and inconsistent explanation for something so important is acceptable to you, then okay, it makes sense to think the 9/11 truthers are ridiculous.

Just one thing to get your inquiry started, should you choose to make one: 9/11 was not the first time a concrete-and-steel skyscraper was struck by an airplane. It is also not the first time such a building had a serious fire. Matter of fact, similar buildings have burned for days, not hours. It was, however, the first time such a building ever collapsed for this reason.

Even if I hated someone's guts, I could still respect that they draw a clear distinction between what they want to believe and what they are willing to consider. What you want to believe is more of an article of faith.