The community would not exist without businesses dependent on it. Communities rely on such businesses for their very survival. A community with nothing but warehouses and datacenters is not a community, it's an industrial park.

You miss the point entirely.

There isn't an extraordinarily vocal and motivated minority attempting to ban the use of vehicles by hijacking vehicle safety legislation. If the sane majority didn't have to worry about those particular zealots, you'd see many more support lots of things they are leery of supporting currently.

Bah. Lose out on all first sales from me.

I have many games lent. They're primarily what I play. I have bought a couple. Most of the games I have lent from friends I would not have ever bought. Some I would, due to replay value.

Without lending, I would not have a console, nor would I ever buy a game as a result. Companies would lose out on all first sales, and the value of new games decrease for many if there is not the expectation they can sell them later to recoup a percentage of the original price. The used market and lending are not "free games." They provide an essential part of how the market currently operates. This will change that, and quite possibly not to the benefit or liking of content producers.

It is, however, exactly like lending a book or movie.

I think this reply belongs further up the chain. I'm pretty sure the poster to whom you replied was asking a rhetorical question to which the answer is "no."

North Korea is the Ferengi, without the lobes for business.

While the reforms are targeting those who should not be in possession of firearms, they also target firearms specifically.

They would outlaw all magazines in excess of 10 rounds, and renew the "scary-looking weapons" ban.

While this legislation isn't a push to ban all firearms from all people, there is a group which mirrors the real gun nuts. They use the passage of common sense laws to put in submarine "discretionary" language, which allows one person, or maybe a handful, to effectively remove large swaths of firearm ownership if they can get supporters into those positions.

It's the submarine subversion by the extremist left corollary to the extremist right which makes those of us who are not extremists very leery of any legislation. It only takes one bad apple to spoil the whole bunch, and it's hard to make sure none of those bad apples get into positions they can abuse. It's easier to try and prevent them passing any legislation which might be subverted, since extremists cannot be trusted (and I mean extremists of any stripe, including pro-gun extremists).

And those legally purchased firearms used in the commission of the first crime on record by that individual would be considered a crime committed with a legally purchased firearm, thus answering the hypothetical question originally posited.

Not to mention, tanks are horribly cramped. There isn't room to put a machine gun inside most tanks, let alone fire it from several positions.

Things start small. To begin with, there would be few who disobeyed orders. After all, their first orders would be to secure some area or other.

It would be no different than the guards on military installations. They will shoot you if you do not follow protocol. In this case, the protocol would be extended to whatever area/incident provoked a hypothetical crackdown.

Civil wars don't just explode out of nowhere. There are many incidents, small and large, which lead up to them. It's the events prior to the flashpoint that help set the stage for soldiers to start shooting at civilians, but in every case it happens. In some hypothetical future civil war in the US, it will be no different from any other in history. Eventually you'll have defections, and depending on how things go most of the remaining US military might eventually turn, but in the beginning almost all will follow orders. It may even end with most following orders.

Unfortunately, the restrictions on standing armies relied on a Congress that had living experience with standing armies being used by their government to suppress them. The Framers had not enough foresight to realize that a two-year authorization limit on funding for military expenditures was far too generous, and would do nothing to prevent the creation of one of the largest permanent standing military forces the world has ever seen.

Large numbers of small arms are the only way to effectively combat a modern military force, short of an equally-equipped, trained, and manned military.

Seems like all that would be needed was a shifting random minimum bit rate to mask an encrypted VBR stream from speech pattern analysis.

I'm sure Opera support will be along shortly, since they're one of the three partners (along with Google and Mozilla) supporting the WebRTC initiative.

From the http://webrtc.org/ front page:
"The WebRTC initiative is a project supported by Google, Mozilla and Opera. This page is maintained by the Google Chrome team."