Smoking inherently affects bystanders. I fully support legalization of marijuana for private use in residences, but I sure as hell don't want to be plagued by yet another form of second hand smoke. Any legislation that legalizes people ruining my meal at a restaurant for their highly selfish personal smoking won't get much support.

I may be going a bit far here, but I'd prefer to see smoking in public going the other way, with police actually enforcing our "no smoking within 9 metres of a public building entrance" laws. Smoke whatever you want at home if you want to -- I couldn't care less. But as soon as you're blowing smoke in the same air I breathe, you're negatively affecting me.

I wish I was checking /. on Tuesday instead of posting on the WoW forums. As far as I can tell, Slashdot has completely missed the point here.

The forums have virtually nothing to do with it. Blizzard could delete the forums tomorrow and it wouldn't affect the community much, aside from having no way of talking with developers / tech support / customer support. We'd all happily migrate over to mmo-champion overnight--it's not that big a deal. Forcing real names on the forums to "prevent trolling" is a total red herring. What this is really about is Activision's recent deal with Facebook. Face-Lizzard-Vision is not something that people want to see.

Of note: In the past when Blizzard has announced major changes to this game that they felt would make this game better, official posters have been very active on the forums posting to clarify concerns, and outline why they see this change as being beneficial. Aside from a couple posts clarifying major misunderstandings, there have been *NO* posts from official Blizzard posters in the last 40,000 posts in the official threat (plus probably at least 10,000 posts in threads that have been locked and/or deleted).

What does this tell you? Blizzard is not behind this change. This change has been forced down the pipe by Activision to attempt to monetize the player base with ad revenue from the facebook deal.

If you're interested, here's a rough timeline of the changes:
September 2009 interview with Activision's CEO where he says that he will attempt to exploit all Activison's franchises for maximum revenue
May 5th, Blizzard announces a deal with Facebook for Facebook integration with WoW
Two weeks ago, RealID is introduced as an optional feature to chat cross server with close friends and family only
On Sunday, an exploit is discovered which makes anyone with an AddOn installed (virtually everyone) vulnerable to have their name identified in game by anyone.
On Tuesday, Blizzard announces that RealID is no longer an optional service, and will now be required for forum use.
A few hours later, a Blizzard poster on the EU forums clarifies this has been in the works for over a year, and that outrage was expected and planned for.

Can you connect the dots? Here's a hint: the purported purpose (slapping down trolls) could be just as easily be handled by requiring forum goers to select a unique handle, or only one WoW character, with which to do all their posting... you know, like, every single other major forum on the planet? The only reason that first name and last name specifically are required are if you make the connection to Facebook!

Additionally, in the patch two weeks ago, changes were made to the Terms of Use (unannounced) to include a subsection on gathering user data for use with a third party advertising partner.

This Real ID changeover has also been planned for over a year, and Blizzard posters have made no attempts to clarify how this proposed system will improve the forums (after all of two minutes it took forum posters to suggest the alternative solution of merely requiring a unique forum moniker.) Blizzard is clearly not behind this change. This is a done deal, by Activision, to sell out WoW players to advertisers, sharing their personal information with the world, through Facebook.

One WoW fan has compiled stats on the official response thread. There are over 12,000 unique posters in the thread, and I guarantee you that by far most of the posts (and every single well written, detailed post that I've read in about 2000+ post read by yours truly) are opposed to the change, with most being vehemently opposed.

The WoW cancellation page was getting so much traffic that some users were having difficulty canceling their subscriptions.

So please, don't talk about this like it's about forums, or trolls, or whatever else. This is far more than that. And it's a big deal for PC Gamers everywhere, not just WoW/SC2 players, because this represents a new paradigm that is being pushed from one of the biggest publishers in the industry.

I'm not your bu-- Oh God. We've gone recursive!

If any of you are seriously interested on the topic of the boom/bust cycle and why it happens, you really need to read George Soros's latest book. This is the definitive book on the topic. I can't recommend this book highly enough.

In my experience, treatment of history at the university level was far more balanced than you describe.

I took two courses on Canadian war history at a major Ontario university. We were challenged throughout the course to try to understand the worldview of Canadians at major points in our history. A major controversy in Canadian war history is the internment of Italian Canadians from September '41 thru September '43.

Most students in the class were shocked and appalled that Canadian imprisoned ~600. We watched a video with members of the Italian community that were interned and their families that painted a very bleak picture. However, the prof then went on to emphasize the reasoning that went behind the decision to intern these Canadian citizens, how they were acting on limited information, and how the members of the Italian community were selected (they were typically members of pro-Italian fascism youth groups, who indeed had a few small riots/demonstrations at the time.)

The point being, I think that my university history courses did a reasonably good job of trying to sort through the propaganda and rhetoric to determine not only what happened historically, but also why it happened.

Just because material is taught well doesn't mean it will be understood, though. I came in to discuss the Italian internment exam question with my prof, and he indicated that many members of the class still gave completely one-sided responses to the question decrying the internment.