Cinema:
- Prevent angry apartment neighbors (or police) from knocking on your door
- AC

Those so-called "audiophiles" in the link don't realize that power cables and amplified speaker wire don't mesh well.

Try sticking the other in your nose.

I bet they already assume the privacy issue, as it's talked about ad nauseam elsewhere, and are bringing up secondary problems.
I'm sure very few slashdotters would argue pro big-brother ;)

Shouldn't California be concerned for those growing central valley towns and cities like Tracy?
There are hordes of people commuting daily from central valley to silicon valley for work.

There would be even less incentive for people to move out there if PAYD was mandatory, which would cause the property values to drop even more than they have.

I'll go out on a limb here and also say that with the amount of miles these commuters drive daily, I bet you they have better intuition in how to drive well to avoid accidents vs. the occasional inner-city driver who drives twice a week to the grocery store...

Americans use it as a verb too.
Remember Eggo waffles?

Yes, this has been my thought all along as well ever since Google Apps came to light.
My beef with this movement is that they're moving solved problems of an OS into the browser app. Scheduling, security, performance, I/O, you name it... and for what? I'll give them platform-agnostic applications, but at what cost?

Can you imagine a world consisting of only javascript apps... -shudder-

The layers of abstraction are completely wrong...

Very early on in WoW, it was possible for both Horde and Alliance to communicate directly.
From the comments, I suspect CoH is the same way.

In WoW, people quickly became very buddy-buddy between factions, especially when one admired each other's PvP skills.
Eventually even the PvP worlds became "carebear"-ish.

Things got quite heated between the factions again once Blizzard disabled direct communication.

It may not be a perfect proof as to what happened to CoH, but it does make one wonder...

Let's look on the other side of the coin, and imagine the TCO of OSS.

Can you imagine a medium-scale business environment switching from Microsoft to the OSS available today?
I can see an unbounded amount of wasted employee time of people futzing around attempting to fix operator-errors on a linux desktop machine, even after the acclimation period.

It would be nearly impossible for finance to record that amount down on paper.