But you reduce other people's freedom simply by existing since you and me, like everybody else, take up space.
Freedom to do what? Freedom to use my land for whatever? No, that is not freedom, that is chaos (or if the government mandates that, that is tyranny, but thats for a different post). You have no natural freedoms to do anything with things that people own, you have (or at least, in a free society should have), freedom to do whatever on the land you own provided it does not violate the rights of other people. And you have the freedom to do whatever with the things you own so long as it doesn't affect the freedoms of other people. I honestly don't get how me owning a house that happens to be close to a highway that is put in decreases anyone else's freedoms.
I am fine with taxing people for taking up space to motivate them to take up less.
So you are advocating communism? Sorry, but just about every communist state that didn't utterly collapse sacrificed many of Marx's ideas, and the few remaining prosperous communist states are introducing more capitalism, and with more capitalism comes more growth. Communism, or de facto communism (by taxing the wealthy so much that they are reduced from a wealthy class) has always failed, and failed horribly.
I would agree that it isn't a bad thing if all their other roads which people use are in great shape. However, I doubt that is the case. You should serve the public first, corporations and government second. If they got stimulus money to fund roads, I would certainly hope they would fix the roads most people used first then move on to side roads second. Or at least fix the worst first and then move on to improving other roads.
But increasing taxes on something you cannot control is. For example, if I choose to work less hours I pay less taxes, if I choose to buy less things I pay less taxes, if I choose to work more I pay more taxes, if I choose to buy more I pay more taxes, but in this case if the people who are not you choose to put something in you pay more taxes. Now, if this was an across the board thing it wouldn't be that bad but when voters can choose to raise taxes without having to pay the taxes themselves, that is taxation without representation.
No. For example, if the government wants to put a new highway in near my house, does my property value go up if it was formerly in the middle of nowhere? Yes. But did I want that highway? Did I even have a vote on whether or not a highway gets built? Probably not. So in essence you would be taxing me for something that I didn't approve. Again, taxation without representation is tyranny. And while in this case MS undoubtedly had some say in building the road and where it was, for most small businesses and individual landowners, they don't have any say, and if they do it is only one vote.
Ok, if Washington is anything like my states, there are plenty of roads that need repairs and bridges that need to be built before a bridge that only helps one company. Essentially all this does is go from one end of MS's campus to the other. So who uses this? MS and their employees. When there are crumbling bridges and potholes in roads that many, many, more people travel on, it doesn't make any sense to build a road that is only to be used by one company.
Traditional movie stores are dead. Netflix has the best plans for the best money, all with little hassle (well, so long as you have a supported system to watch the streaming movies...), Redbox is quickly replacing the physical movie store because with cheap rates ($1 per night), a sane late-fee system (once you have had it out for a month the movie is yours and the charges stop), many locations (in about a 5 mile radius from my house there are about 3 Redbox stations), the ability to see what movies are in at any given location online, 24/7 access, and the ability to return to any Redbox make them and Netflix the killers of the traditional movie stores.
However, Madoff stole an immense amount of money- he should be forced to sell his house and property to help compensate those he defrauded.
He should have to pay the money he defrauded, plus a fine from the government. If he has enough cash to do that without selling his house/property, let him. If he has to sell everything that he owns right down to the clothes on his back, let him.
For the amount of money he defrauded people of, he should have to spend one day per household that he defrauded doing manual labor (8 hour workday, with a short break for a meal- nothing fancy, of course). Then, he should have to look at the people and families he defrauded and apologize to them. Hopefully, he'd actually be sorry.
Ah, yes! That makes perfect sense! Of course the rich should get harsher punishments! Isn't that blind justice?!? No, he, and every other person convicted of fraud should have to repay their victims and pay a fine. Nothing more, nothing less. Giving rich people harsher punishments makes absolutely no sense. By that logic all the black people we hung for such simple "crimes" as looking at a white person the wrong way are perfectly justified. You argue nothing more than the equivalent of racism. We need equal justice, from the CEO, to the unemployed.
Isn't petty theft a threat to your property by definition?
Yes, I don't think I made it clear in my post but this is assuming that the person paid back the item (either by giving the item back, or paying the cash value of the item), sure, in essence it can be a threat to your property, but most petty theft is equivalent to something that can go wrong with your merchandise. For example, someone stealing a $20 CD would be just as damaging as someone accidentally breaking the $20 CD and not confessing. Both though are small losses.
Fat chance of that ever happening.
Thats exactly why our current jail system needs to be reformed. For example, a rich teenager with well-to-do parents could probably get out of a jail sentience for, say, smoking marijuana, where the person with parents who are looked down in the community may get a very harsh sentence. By eliminating the jail sentence part of it, it ensures that justice is fair, for example a month in jail is worse then a thousand dollar fine even if you only make seven hundred dollars a month, and fines are rather universal.
I do think that jail, though, can be a lesson.
But reasonings like this is why justice is applied unequally between social classes. The judge thinks that its going to teach the poor kid a lesson if they send them to prison, whereas the rich kid gets off with a fine because hes "a good kid" even though the kid of lower economic status may be a good person.
Make them pay the $50 billion out to those investors he stole from. Sell all of his assets, use that to pay for some of it, if he didn't pay his taxes let the government take that out of there. If there is not $50 billion when everything is liquefied, garnish his wages for the rest of his life until he pays all $50 billion. Sure, even if he lives to be 1000 he might not be able to pay all of it, but its better that he has to work towards it being payed off then just being in jail and those who he scammed get little to nothing.
Look, as much as we want our corporate overlords to go to jail, they do not belong there (along with 95% of the people we send to jail).
If Martha Stewart or Bernie Madoff lived next to you, would your life, property, freedom, or the lives of your family be threatened? No. They do not belong in jail. Should they be on house arrest where they can not run their company? Yes. Should they be forced to pay money to those they defrauded? Yes. But should they be in jail? No.
Similarly, non-violent "crimes" should not go to jail either, smoking marijuana for example should not land you in jail, smoking marijuana and driving and you end up killing someone, they should go to jail. Copyright infringement? No jail. Drunk Driving and killing or seriously injuring someone? Yes. Murder? Yes. Rape? Yes. Violent theft? Yes. Petty theft? No.
Jail should be reserved for violent crimes. Fines, house arrest, probation, etc should be used for all non violent crimes. The fact we throw everyone into jail for the most trivial things is what is creating our overcrowding prisons. Why should I have to pay for Madoff to live in jail when he can pay his own way and have house arrest + major fines along with paying those he defrauded?
The sad part is, I honestly don't think GNR really cares that this guy uploaded their CD, but because they sold their souls to the RIAA, the RIAA can sue this person to pieces and GNR won't receive a penny of it.
So yes jailing people for non-violent offenses is acceptable.
No, no, no, just because our country seems to think that all bad people should go to jail, doesn't mean that its right. Tell me, what is the purpose of jail? It is not a "time out" like our country seems to think it is, it is where you should put violent criminals so they no longer terrorize the street until they are reformed. Yes, as in, full civil rights, etc when they get out. We wonder why we have overcrowded prisons, well this is why.
Is what they are doing good? No. But put them on house arrest, forbid them for taking public money, make them pay reparations to those they have defrauded. Madoff is a bad person, I'm sure we can all agree on that, but is he a danger if he lives next door? Is your life or property in danger if he comes to your house? No. Therefore, he should not be sent to jail. Similarly tax fraud should be the same way, if they aren't a danger to the passerby then they should not be jailed, plain and simple.
he did the equivalent of taking somebody's work without payment
Sure, but if your boss doesn't pay you, does that make him a violent criminal? No. He should have to pay you for your work, but should he have to go to jail at taxpayer expense. Heck no.
Yah, and we all know how great debtors prison worked out. Honestly, for all non-violent offenses there should be no jail time whatsoever. It seems like we are using jail time as more or less a "time out" rather then to keep all the violent criminals off the street (the reason jails should be used), and theres a reason why our prisons are overcrowded, we seem to send people to prison for trivial offenses (like this one), or for offenses that are totally nonviolent in nature (tax evasion, etc).
Our country really needs to take a look at the purpose of government before we do anything else. We are becoming closer and closer to a dictatorship, we already have (basically) a one-party system (for all intents and purposes, democrats and republicans are the same party), government-censored media, in some cases government controlled media, our constitution is becoming nothing more then an illusion, the bill of rights seem to be disappearing faster then ever, and our government is pursuing part-ownership in several businesses (the media calls it a bailout).
Plugin version? OS? There seem to be some versions of the Flash plugin that are super-fast, other versions enjoy eating your CPU and RAM. Usually, Mac/Linux versions aren't that great compared to the Windows version, but here on Flash 10 R22 on Ubuntu 8.10 running on a Athlon 64 3500+ with about 700 some MB of RAM, it works fine, no Flashblock, no NoScript, no Adblock (though I do have a hosts file configured to block most ad servers) running on Firefox 3.0.7
What is the point of prison time in the first place? Isn't it to keep dangerous criminals off the street so they don't hurt people? So what dangerous crime did this person do? Nothing. So why should my tax dollars be wasted protecting me from, in essence, nothing? Sure, if he shot a guy, lock him up, I have no problems with that because he could shoot again and injure or kill me, this guy though, my tax dollars protect me from a guy who uploaded a few songs. Wow, such a violent crime!
This is a temporary problem. As computers get faster, this problem will go away.
Um, it has been stated that its a temporary problem ever since Java applets were introduced in the '90s, and even today with dual-core multi-ghz CPUs commonplace as Gigabytes of RAM, the problem still hasn't gone away.
Similarly, Flash seemed just as fast on a Pentium III with about 128 MB of RAM as it does today on the latest quad-core box.
The nice thing about Flash though, its fast. Sure, some of the plugins enjoy eating up 100% of CPU occasionally, but as a whole Flash is a rather fast language, I haven't ever seen a fast Java applet on the other hand...
As for GUIs I can safely say my Ubuntu install is far less consistent than the Windows install I have in a VM.
What are you on? Just take a look at most Windows programs, different looks everywhere. (there used to be a nice screenshot that someone took highlighting this fact, but I can't seem to find it on google at the moment) Just look at Office 2007, it has a different look then XP's native toolkit, that looks different then Windows Live Messenger, that looks different then Visual Studio, etc. Mix MS's own inconsistency (remember that aside from the base GNU toolkits, almost all the software is from different people/organizations) with programs almost every Windows user uses (iTunes, etc) and you get tons of interfaces. On the other hand, most Linux software is either QT or GTK.
Look, for most people who A) Don't need the "obscure" features of Office B) Don't need MS server support (such as Exchange) C) Don't game or D) Don't need photoshop, Linux is the obvious choice. There are many, many, many businesses and most homes that fall into these categories. There are some people who obviously *need* Photoshop, there are a lot more that *think* they need Photoshop when The GIMP (or a more basic image editor) can do exactly what they want albeit with a different UI. Sure, there are some features of Office that OOo doesn't have yet, but these features aren't the "everyday" features, its the obscure stuff, secondly, the argument of a lower learning curve goes down the drain when you show the UI of 2007 to a user of a previous version of Office, and then show them the familiar interface of OOo. Sure, there will be people who can't switch to Linux because of a program that is crucial to their business doesn't run on Linux (or isn't emulated well in WINE). But for all others,(and that is a large amount of people), Linux does just fine.
Someone who wants to do anything in a GUI?
What are you talking about? Installing? Almost all distros have a GUI for installing. Changing settings? For any day-to-day settings, there is a GUI for that. Etc. About the only time you don't have a GUI (assuming of course that this is on Ubuntu or similar, not Gentoo or Arch) is when you change a setting that to do the approximate Windows setting you would edit the registry.
So wait... Even though I can find blueprints of various government buildings on a website, can find listings of just about every church out there with directions on the web along with schools... The fact that I can get satellite images of them somehow means that it will be abused somehow? Why is it that in this country our government increasingly mandates to remove anything that might possibly be used for evil because its "new"? The fact that I can get blueprints of various important government buildings at the library of congress isn't an issue, but because I can look at them in Google Earth it is? The USA is becoming more and more like a dictatorship.
Myself throughout the campaign I was a conservative/libertarian (ended up voting for McCain rather than Barr because I'd rather have an incompetent McCain then a disastrous Obama and in my state Barr didn't have a chance), however during the campaign everyone who was for Obama pointed out to me how he wanted to be transparent and how he wouldn't dismiss everything under the sun as a national security issue like Bush had during his 8 years. Not only that but they assured me that Obama was going to be held accountable for every single one of his campaign promises, I didn't believe them of course, but now that he's elected whats more fun then "I told you so" to those who so feverishly supported him less than 6 months ago.
Wait... Didn't Obama say he was all for transparency? How less transparent can you get that you can't even disclose a treaty about copyright without it being a matter of "national security". Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
If effectively these organizations become the new state, does that make them terrorist organizations or simply another form of government? Government existed for centuries (and still does) on who has the best weapons and the biggest army. Theres a few reasons though why this won't happen so long as the constitution is protected. A) The ability for the public to arm themselves, a small gang can easily terrorize a neighborhood, however, if the neighborhood happens to be well armed, then the fact that the gang member has a gun isn't too big of a deal because the other ~100 people in the neighborhood do also. In the countries you named, either there was strict gun control or the poverty level was such that the average person could not afford a firearm along with ammo to defend themselves. The second amendment is crucial to our protection from a gang government. B) Cyberwarfare levels the playing field. No longer is economics an issue, a person using old, cheap, outdated hardware can just as easily write a damaging worm as someone on the newest Core i7 box, unlike traditional warfare where those with the best (physical) weapons win. C) Internet vigilantes. Just look at the/. effect for an innocent example, but think about if there was a truly evil website (not just the RIAA, etc) out there, I imagine that it wouldn't be too long before a small group of internet users with decent bandwidth either managed to find an exploit or DoS the site.
So is it a possibility? Yes, but as long as the second amendment is protected and the group of those opposing the gang government is larger then the gang, I just can't see it happening.
Honestly, not supporting a business that resides in your nation during the current state of the economy is a pretty bad thing for the government to do.
But which companies to support? Red Hat is based in the USA as are many other Linux-based companies. The thing is, when you keep buying things from a certain company just because its made in the USA, you help monopolies and deny justice. Why would the justice department pass a ruling on MS if everything they use is MS based and in the short term it would cost more money to switch?
The point is that the government should be helping to foster the development of it's own economy by investing into it.
But why support a company convicted of running an abusive monopoly? Sure, if it was cheaper to do it the MS way it might make some sense, but compared to Linux, MS is very expensive for little to no quality benefit. By buying MS products governments are helping MS build an even larger monopoly along with effectively tying the hands of judges in monopoly cases.
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But you reduce other people's freedom simply by existing since you and me, like everybody else, take up space.
Freedom to do what? Freedom to use my land for whatever? No, that is not freedom, that is chaos (or if the government mandates that, that is tyranny, but thats for a different post). You have no natural freedoms to do anything with things that people own, you have (or at least, in a free society should have), freedom to do whatever on the land you own provided it does not violate the rights of other people. And you have the freedom to do whatever with the things you own so long as it doesn't affect the freedoms of other people. I honestly don't get how me owning a house that happens to be close to a highway that is put in decreases anyone else's freedoms.
I am fine with taxing people for taking up space to motivate them to take up less.
So you are advocating communism? Sorry, but just about every communist state that didn't utterly collapse sacrificed many of Marx's ideas, and the few remaining prosperous communist states are introducing more capitalism, and with more capitalism comes more growth. Communism, or de facto communism (by taxing the wealthy so much that they are reduced from a wealthy class) has always failed, and failed horribly.
I would agree that it isn't a bad thing if all their other roads which people use are in great shape. However, I doubt that is the case. You should serve the public first, corporations and government second. If they got stimulus money to fund roads, I would certainly hope they would fix the roads most people used first then move on to side roads second. Or at least fix the worst first and then move on to improving other roads.
But increasing taxes on something you cannot control is. For example, if I choose to work less hours I pay less taxes, if I choose to buy less things I pay less taxes, if I choose to work more I pay more taxes, if I choose to buy more I pay more taxes, but in this case if the people who are not you choose to put something in you pay more taxes. Now, if this was an across the board thing it wouldn't be that bad but when voters can choose to raise taxes without having to pay the taxes themselves, that is taxation without representation.
No. For example, if the government wants to put a new highway in near my house, does my property value go up if it was formerly in the middle of nowhere? Yes. But did I want that highway? Did I even have a vote on whether or not a highway gets built? Probably not. So in essence you would be taxing me for something that I didn't approve. Again, taxation without representation is tyranny. And while in this case MS undoubtedly had some say in building the road and where it was, for most small businesses and individual landowners, they don't have any say, and if they do it is only one vote.
Ok, if Washington is anything like my states, there are plenty of roads that need repairs and bridges that need to be built before a bridge that only helps one company. Essentially all this does is go from one end of MS's campus to the other. So who uses this? MS and their employees. When there are crumbling bridges and potholes in roads that many, many, more people travel on, it doesn't make any sense to build a road that is only to be used by one company.
Traditional movie stores are dead. Netflix has the best plans for the best money, all with little hassle (well, so long as you have a supported system to watch the streaming movies...), Redbox is quickly replacing the physical movie store because with cheap rates ($1 per night), a sane late-fee system (once you have had it out for a month the movie is yours and the charges stop), many locations (in about a 5 mile radius from my house there are about 3 Redbox stations), the ability to see what movies are in at any given location online, 24/7 access, and the ability to return to any Redbox make them and Netflix the killers of the traditional movie stores.
However, Madoff stole an immense amount of money- he should be forced to sell his house and property to help compensate those he defrauded.
He should have to pay the money he defrauded, plus a fine from the government. If he has enough cash to do that without selling his house/property, let him. If he has to sell everything that he owns right down to the clothes on his back, let him.
For the amount of money he defrauded people of, he should have to spend one day per household that he defrauded doing manual labor (8 hour workday, with a short break for a meal- nothing fancy, of course). Then, he should have to look at the people and families he defrauded and apologize to them. Hopefully, he'd actually be sorry.
Ah, yes! That makes perfect sense! Of course the rich should get harsher punishments! Isn't that blind justice?!? No, he, and every other person convicted of fraud should have to repay their victims and pay a fine. Nothing more, nothing less. Giving rich people harsher punishments makes absolutely no sense. By that logic all the black people we hung for such simple "crimes" as looking at a white person the wrong way are perfectly justified. You argue nothing more than the equivalent of racism. We need equal justice, from the CEO, to the unemployed.
Isn't petty theft a threat to your property by definition?
Yes, I don't think I made it clear in my post but this is assuming that the person paid back the item (either by giving the item back, or paying the cash value of the item), sure, in essence it can be a threat to your property, but most petty theft is equivalent to something that can go wrong with your merchandise. For example, someone stealing a $20 CD would be just as damaging as someone accidentally breaking the $20 CD and not confessing. Both though are small losses.
Fat chance of that ever happening.
Thats exactly why our current jail system needs to be reformed. For example, a rich teenager with well-to-do parents could probably get out of a jail sentience for, say, smoking marijuana, where the person with parents who are looked down in the community may get a very harsh sentence. By eliminating the jail sentence part of it, it ensures that justice is fair, for example a month in jail is worse then a thousand dollar fine even if you only make seven hundred dollars a month, and fines are rather universal.
I do think that jail, though, can be a lesson.
But reasonings like this is why justice is applied unequally between social classes. The judge thinks that its going to teach the poor kid a lesson if they send them to prison, whereas the rich kid gets off with a fine because hes "a good kid" even though the kid of lower economic status may be a good person.
Make them pay the $50 billion out to those investors he stole from. Sell all of his assets, use that to pay for some of it, if he didn't pay his taxes let the government take that out of there. If there is not $50 billion when everything is liquefied, garnish his wages for the rest of his life until he pays all $50 billion. Sure, even if he lives to be 1000 he might not be able to pay all of it, but its better that he has to work towards it being payed off then just being in jail and those who he scammed get little to nothing.
Look, as much as we want our corporate overlords to go to jail, they do not belong there (along with 95% of the people we send to jail).
If Martha Stewart or Bernie Madoff lived next to you, would your life, property, freedom, or the lives of your family be threatened? No. They do not belong in jail. Should they be on house arrest where they can not run their company? Yes. Should they be forced to pay money to those they defrauded? Yes. But should they be in jail? No.
Similarly, non-violent "crimes" should not go to jail either, smoking marijuana for example should not land you in jail, smoking marijuana and driving and you end up killing someone, they should go to jail. Copyright infringement? No jail. Drunk Driving and killing or seriously injuring someone? Yes. Murder? Yes. Rape? Yes. Violent theft? Yes. Petty theft? No.
Jail should be reserved for violent crimes. Fines, house arrest, probation, etc should be used for all non violent crimes. The fact we throw everyone into jail for the most trivial things is what is creating our overcrowding prisons. Why should I have to pay for Madoff to live in jail when he can pay his own way and have house arrest + major fines along with paying those he defrauded?
The sad part is, I honestly don't think GNR really cares that this guy uploaded their CD, but because they sold their souls to the RIAA, the RIAA can sue this person to pieces and GNR won't receive a penny of it.
So yes jailing people for non-violent offenses is acceptable.
No, no, no, just because our country seems to think that all bad people should go to jail, doesn't mean that its right. Tell me, what is the purpose of jail? It is not a "time out" like our country seems to think it is, it is where you should put violent criminals so they no longer terrorize the street until they are reformed. Yes, as in, full civil rights, etc when they get out. We wonder why we have overcrowded prisons, well this is why.
Is what they are doing good? No. But put them on house arrest, forbid them for taking public money, make them pay reparations to those they have defrauded. Madoff is a bad person, I'm sure we can all agree on that, but is he a danger if he lives next door? Is your life or property in danger if he comes to your house? No. Therefore, he should not be sent to jail. Similarly tax fraud should be the same way, if they aren't a danger to the passerby then they should not be jailed, plain and simple.
he did the equivalent of taking somebody's work without payment
Sure, but if your boss doesn't pay you, does that make him a violent criminal? No. He should have to pay you for your work, but should he have to go to jail at taxpayer expense. Heck no.
Yah, and we all know how great debtors prison worked out. Honestly, for all non-violent offenses there should be no jail time whatsoever. It seems like we are using jail time as more or less a "time out" rather then to keep all the violent criminals off the street (the reason jails should be used), and theres a reason why our prisons are overcrowded, we seem to send people to prison for trivial offenses (like this one), or for offenses that are totally nonviolent in nature (tax evasion, etc).
Our country really needs to take a look at the purpose of government before we do anything else. We are becoming closer and closer to a dictatorship, we already have (basically) a one-party system (for all intents and purposes, democrats and republicans are the same party), government-censored media, in some cases government controlled media, our constitution is becoming nothing more then an illusion, the bill of rights seem to be disappearing faster then ever, and our government is pursuing part-ownership in several businesses (the media calls it a bailout).
Plugin version? OS? There seem to be some versions of the Flash plugin that are super-fast, other versions enjoy eating your CPU and RAM. Usually, Mac/Linux versions aren't that great compared to the Windows version, but here on Flash 10 R22 on Ubuntu 8.10 running on a Athlon 64 3500+ with about 700 some MB of RAM, it works fine, no Flashblock, no NoScript, no Adblock (though I do have a hosts file configured to block most ad servers) running on Firefox 3.0.7
What is the point of prison time in the first place? Isn't it to keep dangerous criminals off the street so they don't hurt people? So what dangerous crime did this person do? Nothing. So why should my tax dollars be wasted protecting me from, in essence, nothing? Sure, if he shot a guy, lock him up, I have no problems with that because he could shoot again and injure or kill me, this guy though, my tax dollars protect me from a guy who uploaded a few songs. Wow, such a violent crime!
This is a temporary problem. As computers get faster, this problem will go away.
Um, it has been stated that its a temporary problem ever since Java applets were introduced in the '90s, and even today with dual-core multi-ghz CPUs commonplace as Gigabytes of RAM, the problem still hasn't gone away.
Similarly, Flash seemed just as fast on a Pentium III with about 128 MB of RAM as it does today on the latest quad-core box.
The nice thing about Flash though, its fast. Sure, some of the plugins enjoy eating up 100% of CPU occasionally, but as a whole Flash is a rather fast language, I haven't ever seen a fast Java applet on the other hand...
So far I'm not aware of any good solution to that problem.
Bluetooth. Sure, the battery life might be reduced, but it takes care of the wires.
As for GUIs I can safely say my Ubuntu install is far less consistent than the Windows install I have in a VM.
What are you on? Just take a look at most Windows programs, different looks everywhere. (there used to be a nice screenshot that someone took highlighting this fact, but I can't seem to find it on google at the moment) Just look at Office 2007, it has a different look then XP's native toolkit, that looks different then Windows Live Messenger, that looks different then Visual Studio, etc. Mix MS's own inconsistency (remember that aside from the base GNU toolkits, almost all the software is from different people/organizations) with programs almost every Windows user uses (iTunes, etc) and you get tons of interfaces. On the other hand, most Linux software is either QT or GTK.
Someone who wants to do anything in a GUI?
What are you talking about? Installing? Almost all distros have a GUI for installing. Changing settings? For any day-to-day settings, there is a GUI for that. Etc. About the only time you don't have a GUI (assuming of course that this is on Ubuntu or similar, not Gentoo or Arch) is when you change a setting that to do the approximate Windows setting you would edit the registry.
So wait... Even though I can find blueprints of various government buildings on a website, can find listings of just about every church out there with directions on the web along with schools... The fact that I can get satellite images of them somehow means that it will be abused somehow? Why is it that in this country our government increasingly mandates to remove anything that might possibly be used for evil because its "new"? The fact that I can get blueprints of various important government buildings at the library of congress isn't an issue, but because I can look at them in Google Earth it is? The USA is becoming more and more like a dictatorship.
Myself throughout the campaign I was a conservative/libertarian (ended up voting for McCain rather than Barr because I'd rather have an incompetent McCain then a disastrous Obama and in my state Barr didn't have a chance), however during the campaign everyone who was for Obama pointed out to me how he wanted to be transparent and how he wouldn't dismiss everything under the sun as a national security issue like Bush had during his 8 years. Not only that but they assured me that Obama was going to be held accountable for every single one of his campaign promises, I didn't believe them of course, but now that he's elected whats more fun then "I told you so" to those who so feverishly supported him less than 6 months ago.
Wait... Didn't Obama say he was all for transparency? How less transparent can you get that you can't even disclose a treaty about copyright without it being a matter of "national security". Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
If effectively these organizations become the new state, does that make them terrorist organizations or simply another form of government? Government existed for centuries (and still does) on who has the best weapons and the biggest army. Theres a few reasons though why this won't happen so long as the constitution is protected. A) The ability for the public to arm themselves, a small gang can easily terrorize a neighborhood, however, if the neighborhood happens to be well armed, then the fact that the gang member has a gun isn't too big of a deal because the other ~100 people in the neighborhood do also. In the countries you named, either there was strict gun control or the poverty level was such that the average person could not afford a firearm along with ammo to defend themselves. The second amendment is crucial to our protection from a gang government. B) Cyberwarfare levels the playing field. No longer is economics an issue, a person using old, cheap, outdated hardware can just as easily write a damaging worm as someone on the newest Core i7 box, unlike traditional warfare where those with the best (physical) weapons win. C) Internet vigilantes. Just look at the /. effect for an innocent example, but think about if there was a truly evil website (not just the RIAA, etc) out there, I imagine that it wouldn't be too long before a small group of internet users with decent bandwidth either managed to find an exploit or DoS the site.
So is it a possibility? Yes, but as long as the second amendment is protected and the group of those opposing the gang government is larger then the gang, I just can't see it happening.
Honestly, not supporting a business that resides in your nation during the current state of the economy is a pretty bad thing for the government to do.
But which companies to support? Red Hat is based in the USA as are many other Linux-based companies. The thing is, when you keep buying things from a certain company just because its made in the USA, you help monopolies and deny justice. Why would the justice department pass a ruling on MS if everything they use is MS based and in the short term it would cost more money to switch?
The point is that the government should be helping to foster the development of it's own economy by investing into it.
But why support a company convicted of running an abusive monopoly? Sure, if it was cheaper to do it the MS way it might make some sense, but compared to Linux, MS is very expensive for little to no quality benefit. By buying MS products governments are helping MS build an even larger monopoly along with effectively tying the hands of judges in monopoly cases.