"I agree, companies do have a right to contact me."
That's all well and good, but what about the wasted bandwidth I spent downloading said spam, and the processor cycles stolen from me to process all the HTML and render the images in it? With USPS, both printing and delivery costs are the sender, but the recipient is responsible for at least part of those two when it comes to e-mail. It's like someone mailing you a credit card ad COD.
Alright, so it sounds like I'm being anal retentive, but it still intrudes on my right to decide how my computer and my internet connection are used. The difference between this and getting hacked is merely an order of magnitude, nothing more.
Silly me. And here I thought money was money. I've never had a cashier ask me if the money I was spending was "old money" or "new money" before. Guess I don't live in the right tax bracket. Can you ever forgive me?
Does that mean he has to pay less taxes than Gates?
Our problem isn't quite the same. Unless I'm being more ignorant than usual, honours are technically bestowed by the nobility, the UK queen = Canadian queen.
They've probably been working on the proper security settings since W2K hit the market, spending heaps of man-hours and tax dollars trying to find the right template that makes their data-protection job easier and web hosters happy. Then they make this template avaiable for public access and use (read "scrutiny"). Do you really think they'd foul the whole thing up by then inserting a back door that the whole internet-surfing world could see for themselves?
Before trying to accuse the NSA of putting a private back door into your OS, be ready to explain how your conspiracy theory would keep it private. "Relying on the stupidity of several hundred million individuals" gets cut to shreds by Occam's Razor.
Because of the amount of interest in the Windows 2000 Security Recommendation Guides, we are updating our Web site to better handle the demands placed on downloading the files. We expect to make the guides available once again during the week of June 18, 2001.
"It looks like for this issue with file formats, we should be supporting AOL, since the Real Player is available for Linux, unlike the Windows Media Player.. "
I'm not a big fan of either one, personally. While both are nice for watching broadcast media like NASA TV, I don't like the way many sites use them as a "Thou shalt not download" tool on their media (it feels like a TV station trying to prevent me from using my VCR). Especially when they force me to download a proprietary player to view something they could have easily just encoded as an MPG.
(Anybody else miss the days before the banner ad?)
And as far as who I think we should support, I think we should support the idea of both of them mutually driving each other out of business. While Windows wants to make their own music encoding scheme the new standard, AOL/TW is also trying to fuck with on-line music through the RIAA.
All in all, these two companies were in talks to try to divy up markets, deciding how we can and cannot access parts of the internet, while a new MP3 codec was released.
First off, for someone seemingly trying to be unbiased about the issue, that subject line alone screams "I'm right, you're wrong." Maybe you should re-consider that strategy if you want me to sympathize with the French (OK, so you'd NEVER get me to sympathize with the French, but that doesn't mean you can't try:) ).
"Yahoo has a commercial presence in France, both a web site (yahoo.fr), and a sales and marketing group based in Paris. This makes them liable to French law."
Only Yahoo's French websites and their business practices within France would fall under French jurisdiction. If all companies that operated in the US had to, say, comply with US minimum wage laws even outside of US borders, there wouldn't be such a draw to manufacturers to set up shop in China or Mexico.
Yahoo lied to the court, claiming it was technically impossible to add a disclaimer based on IP block and keywords, despite a number of witnesses telling the court that was exactly how banner advertising works. The court didn't even require 100% accuracy, merely a good effort to inform French citizens who might happen across such an auction.
It's not a question about whether it would have been easy for Yahoo to comply with the requests of the French court, but whether Yahoo should have to comply to begin with. It's either a just ruling or it's not, no gray area. Just because it would have been easy for Rosa Parks to sit in the back of the bus doesn't mean that the law was alright to begin with.
Now Yahoo has been ordered to cease all commercial activity in France, although I believe they are still operating in defiance of the court order.
I haven't heard one way or the other if this is true (a link or two would be nice), nor do I know much about the French legal system, but I DO know that most American DA's would love to make a name for themselves by going after a big company like Yahoo for defying a court order like that. Lots of headlines (read "free political advertising").
Yahoo did this, Yahoo did that, Yahoo isn't a very nice company, Yahoo is pro-Nazi, blah blah blah... The issue still seems to be whether a French court can hold Yahoo accountable for information on US-based sites.
If the French government doesn't want to let their own people censor themselves, the worst they should be able to do is force French ISPs to censor the content within French borders. All in all, though, Freenet seems to be progressing rather nicely...
IIRC, the US isn't really a part of the International Court of Justice. I think we're an "official observer" or some such fancy name for a sideline position. Something to do with our usual desire to stay out of anything resembling a "world government."
You know, I love nuking things in StarCraft, Red Alert, and various other games that involve "the Bomb." Yet, even though I have four or five semesters of physics under my belt, I've yet to feel the need to build a bomb.
I'm the only person I know that plays first-person shooters through to the end, from Doom to Half-Life. Yet I still haven't bought a gun (unless you count the BB gun).
What's next? Is someone going to come out saying that Mario games cause kids to jump on the heads of innocent by-standers?
"I'm not sure I'd want some Danish toy company commodifying my identity either."
OK, but what gives the Maori the right to try to control ALL Polynesian culture? Polynesians are all over the Pacific Ocean, and they're not all a part of New Zealand. Heck, a good deal of them live in the US (Hawaii and assorted territories).
The Maori saying that a generally Polynesian-themed game violates their "copyright" is as silly as the PRC saying that all websites in Chinese must be controlled by the Chinese government.
Then who's laws would be enforced? If one miner murdered another, what court would they stand trial in? If the company short-changed an employee in one way or another, what could they do about it?
Even more interesting is how this private company would be able to sell their stuff back on Earth. If your cargo ship landed in, say, Canada, what would prevent the Canadian government from immediately claiming that the ship and all its cargo belongs to them?
That will be kinda tough to do. How can you mine minerals that you don't own? How can you own minerals when you can't claim the land they're in? How can you claim land when there's a pesky little UN treaty in the way?
I was doing some thinking about Xbox today, and I realized that this is the first time that comes to memory of Microsoft trying to break into an alien and well-established industry. PC operating systems, office applications, web browsers.. these are all things Microsoft stuck their fingers in quite early into the game to do their whole "embrace and expand" (read "slash and burn") tactics with.
However, we have Microsoft now trying to get into an industry that is extremely well-established. Of their two major competitors, one has been in the business for over a decade, and the other for about half a decade. Beyond that, this isn't just a software endeavor any more; this also involves hardware, something that Microsoft has historically left alone. The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the Xbox is just an example of Microsoft's ego and cockiness running away with them. "We're Microsoft, and we can take over any industry we want." They might as well be trying to make movies or gasoline.
You can't really compare Microsoft to Sony when they were first starting to work on the PlayStation because Sony had two advantages that Microsoft didn't: Some previous console experience (the PSX was supposed to be a CD add-on to the SNES) and experience in the consumer electronics area (hardware). Hell, even Phillips and Panasonic were better prepared to enter this field than Microsoft.
The Xbox so far has no killer apps (nothing worth looking at in light of Final Fantasy and Zelda), has no serious hardware advantage to distinguish itself from its competition, and generally has no direction (even compared to PS2. "I'm a game console! No, wait, I'm a cheap PC! Nope, um, maybe a DVD player with extras?"). It's this kind of wishy-washiness that has allowed Nintendo to deflate Microsoft's months of hype in a single weekend.
There's just no way the nightmare scenarioes I'm seeing in these posts can come about. Microsoft is not going to dominate the console industry because, unlike IE, they have about 20 years of catching up to do, and they seem to be allergic to hard work.
In case you haven't looked at your calendar, it's May going on June. Release is in November, at which time they have to have several million of these puppies manufactured to put on store shelves. Why are they still using "pre-alpha" code? For all the time they've had to work on this and the little time they have left, they had better be "mostly finished" by now. If not, they run the risk of having game publishers putting out games that don't run in the current software environment.
If they have anything more than a few inconsitancies to tweak out, they're setting themselves up to get smacked around so much they'll make Virtual Boy look as popular as the NES. Us console gamers don't take kindly to software patches.
What? Your copy of The Matrix keeps on crashing your system? That's too bad. Metroid, anyone?
If they're waiting until the last second to churn out the software, they're doing a very good job of it...
"(2) the current dev. kits (the machines that the games were running on at E3) are literally a PC with a silver case."
The dev kits for the NGC are pretty much the same thing, and yet have had few apparent problems. By all accounts that I've read, the Nintendo booth is the heart of this year's show and all the Nintendo hardware has been put through the paces a lot more than PS2 and Xbox stuff.
However, does this mean that there's no actual working hardware at E3? And everybody thinks Nintendo will be the one delaying their system launch...
I think getting bitch-slapped by Nintendo will be a good learning experience for Microsoft.
"So you are then saying that even though you see the light, you will just go ahead and pull out in front of the source of the light (motorcycle or otherwise) anyway?"
I'm saying I can't tell if it's right in front of me or a little to the left until it's practically right on top of me. I'm saying that I can't see any visual cues to tell me if I'm drifting into the left lane or not. That I can't see if the road goes off to the right while I keep going straight. How can you expect me to try harder not to hit you when I have no idea if I'm going to hit you in the first place?
"Furthermore, if you honestly expect anyone to believe that a single headlight in DAYLIGHT is blinding you to the extent that you can't see other potential obsticals, then we should all be scared that you are on the road at all."
First off, most of the instances that come to mind with being blinded by a motorcycle were around 2 in the morning. However, if a headlight is bright enough to make me blink through my sunglasses (which HAS happened), it's still a hazard because I can't keep my eyes open.
"On the sixth page, it goes through the stats, state by state. I won't ask so much of you to do the math yourself, so I did it for you. This 54% is from only 22 states and D.C. where states have mandatory helmet laws. To try to impress upon you the significance of this, it means that 45% of the states account for 54% of the deaths."
First off, that alone means nothing. Population is not distributed evenly among the 50 states. Compare the results of the last popular presidential election to the number of states won by each candidate.
While you're stuck on math, let's look at the "Percent of total traffic fatalities" column. The average (mean) percent of total fatalities for the 23 states with manditory helmet laws (supercript a) is 4.99%. The average (mean) percent for the three states with no helmet law (supercript c) is 7.4% with a range of 1.9% (Mississippi) to 9.3% (DC) (median: 5.6%), with a range of 6.2% (Iowa) to 8.9% (Colorado) (median: 7.55%). This seems to suggest that you are more likely to die in a state with no helmet laws than one with manditory helmet laws.
To say the least, this data does not prove your cause/effect statement.
"But anyone that actually rides will tell you that many riders wear them anyway, even if it isn't mandatory, which would add to the number of fatalities of helmeted riders."
I'm willing to wager that it's balanced out by riders who wear no helmets in states that require them. Florida has manditory helmet laws, but the ratio of helmeted v. helmetless in Daytona Beach's Bike Week always seems to be around 50:50.
"No, you are correct, forward velocity at time of impact does not equal downward velocity of head on ground. But what about head against side of object being struck? The impact of body to ground is usually the second blow the rider receives, not the first."
Assuming a forward linear velocity of 70 MPH, and you are moving towards a wholly elastic surface, a helmet designed for impact at 12 MPH will protect you as long as you are travelling at an angle of less than about 10 degrees from paralell to the surface (ie. you're going forward, the surface is angled 10 degrees towards you). This assumes that the surface you are moving towards is stationary with respect to your 70 MPH body (say, a concrete barrier). This would only tend to happen if the road turns but you don't, as this is about the maximum angle a vehicle tends to move at while lane-changing on the interstate.
As for your example of a semi changing lanes into you, unless the semi has magic brakes and/or is trying to jacknife or you're zipping along at 140 MPH, the speed difference between the two of you will be MUCH less than 70 MPH. Even if the speed difference is as high as 20 MPH, the helmet will protect you up to angles of 37 degrees. An angle that big would involve the trucker putting himself in danger as well as you.
"And even at the second blow, while I have no statistical data to back me up, my own common sense tells me that the force of head to ground on the second blow will be greater than 12mph,"
A mass falling from a height of 5' will be travelling at around 12.23 MPH as it strikes the floor. The rest is just friction as you skid along.
Of course, if your center of mass is that high off the ground, you should consider sitting on your bike instead of standing on it.
"given that forward velocity on a highway would be between 45 and 70mph (depending on road being traveled),"
Velocity forward and velocity down are perpendicular and wholly independent. Rifle bullet and ejected casing hit the ground at the same time with the same downward velocity.
"Exactly my point, good sir. My position is neither for nor against helmets. What your original post concentrated on was your belief that all riders should be forced to wear helmets."
Actually, my point is that motorcyclists seem to care more about looking cool than actually worrying about such things as road rash, but that all seems moot now...
"The last damn thing we need is a government agency playing the part of mother-knows-best."
You're riding on government owned/funded/maintained roads (which is why they're able to require you to have a license and obey traffic laws while on those roads), and you will probably be treated in a government funded/maintained hospital if you get into a wreck. If you are going to be using their facilities, then there is no reason to think that they should not have any say in the way that you use them.
"Of course, it obviously is beta hardware so such things are to be expected,"
Um, no. This may be "OK" for desktop computers, but this is wholly unacceptable for a box where you aren't supposed to have any more interaction with the OS of the box beyond putting in a game and turning the thing on. And this is ESPECIALLY not acceptable for a box that's supposed to have several million manufactured in time for their November release date in the US.
What could this box possibly have been doing at the time of the crash?
For comparison purposes, when was the last time any other console crashed at a show?
Slashdot Mirror
That's all well and good, but what about the wasted bandwidth I spent downloading said spam, and the processor cycles stolen from me to process all the HTML and render the images in it? With USPS, both printing and delivery costs are the sender, but the recipient is responsible for at least part of those two when it comes to e-mail. It's like someone mailing you a credit card ad COD.
Alright, so it sounds like I'm being anal retentive, but it still intrudes on my right to decide how my computer and my internet connection are used. The difference between this and getting hacked is merely an order of magnitude, nothing more.
Does that mean he has to pay less taxes than Gates?
You mean there's something Sam Robson Walton can't buy? What is it, Denmark?
Our problem isn't quite the same. Unless I'm being more ignorant than usual, honours are technically bestowed by the nobility, the UK queen = Canadian queen.
Yeah yeah, I know, but you gotta admit, a country that's busy having a hissy fit about the UK knighting a few of their citizens (even when it's all the same damn queen to begin with) must not have many more important things to worry about.
Before trying to accuse the NSA of putting a private back door into your OS, be ready to explain how your conspiracy theory would keep it private. "Relying on the stupidity of several hundred million individuals" gets cut to shreds by Occam's Razor.
Setting up a totally kick-ass Freenet node, one that services your entire time zone.
To hell with using gold as an on-line currency, this proves that copper is far more valuable. Money is money, but bandwitdth is life!
If you try to access their reccomendation guides you get redirected to http://www.nsa.gov/winsecnote.htm which says:
Those poor bastards...Why, Nintnedo, why? Why have you forsaken us and sat on the Metroid title for so many long years?
I'm not a big fan of either one, personally. While both are nice for watching broadcast media like NASA TV, I don't like the way many sites use them as a "Thou shalt not download" tool on their media (it feels like a TV station trying to prevent me from using my VCR). Especially when they force me to download a proprietary player to view something they could have easily just encoded as an MPG.
(Anybody else miss the days before the banner ad?)
And as far as who I think we should support, I think we should support the idea of both of them mutually driving each other out of business. While Windows wants to make their own music encoding scheme the new standard, AOL/TW is also trying to fuck with on-line music through the RIAA.
All in all, these two companies were in talks to try to divy up markets, deciding how we can and cannot access parts of the internet, while a new MP3 codec was released.
"Yahoo has a commercial presence in France, both a web site (yahoo.fr), and a sales and marketing group based in Paris. This makes them liable to French law."
Only Yahoo's French websites and their business practices within France would fall under French jurisdiction. If all companies that operated in the US had to, say, comply with US minimum wage laws even outside of US borders, there wouldn't be such a draw to manufacturers to set up shop in China or Mexico.
Yahoo lied to the court, claiming it was technically impossible to add a disclaimer based on IP block and keywords, despite a number of witnesses telling the court that was exactly how banner advertising works. The court didn't even require 100% accuracy, merely a good effort to inform French citizens who might happen across such an auction.
It's not a question about whether it would have been easy for Yahoo to comply with the requests of the French court, but whether Yahoo should have to comply to begin with. It's either a just ruling or it's not, no gray area. Just because it would have been easy for Rosa Parks to sit in the back of the bus doesn't mean that the law was alright to begin with.
Now Yahoo has been ordered to cease all commercial activity in France, although I believe they are still operating in defiance of the court order.
I haven't heard one way or the other if this is true (a link or two would be nice), nor do I know much about the French legal system, but I DO know that most American DA's would love to make a name for themselves by going after a big company like Yahoo for defying a court order like that. Lots of headlines (read "free political advertising").
Yahoo did this, Yahoo did that, Yahoo isn't a very nice company, Yahoo is pro-Nazi, blah blah blah... The issue still seems to be whether a French court can hold Yahoo accountable for information on US-based sites.
If the French government doesn't want to let their own people censor themselves, the worst they should be able to do is force French ISPs to censor the content within French borders. All in all, though, Freenet seems to be progressing rather nicely...
IIRC, the US isn't really a part of the International Court of Justice. I think we're an "official observer" or some such fancy name for a sideline position. Something to do with our usual desire to stay out of anything resembling a "world government."
You know, I love nuking things in StarCraft, Red Alert, and various other games that involve "the Bomb." Yet, even though I have four or five semesters of physics under my belt, I've yet to feel the need to build a bomb.
I'm the only person I know that plays first-person shooters through to the end, from Doom to Half-Life. Yet I still haven't bought a gun (unless you count the BB gun).
What's next? Is someone going to come out saying that Mario games cause kids to jump on the heads of innocent by-standers?
OK, but what gives the Maori the right to try to control ALL Polynesian culture? Polynesians are all over the Pacific Ocean, and they're not all a part of New Zealand. Heck, a good deal of them live in the US (Hawaii and assorted territories).
The Maori saying that a generally Polynesian-themed game violates their "copyright" is as silly as the PRC saying that all websites in Chinese must be controlled by the Chinese government.
... and you're not?
Even more interesting is how this private company would be able to sell their stuff back on Earth. If your cargo ship landed in, say, Canada, what would prevent the Canadian government from immediately claiming that the ship and all its cargo belongs to them?
That will be kinda tough to do. How can you mine minerals that you don't own? How can you own minerals when you can't claim the land they're in? How can you claim land when there's a pesky little UN treaty in the way?
I mean, look at it. A bunch of guys doing two dozen different things. Am I the only one reminded of Lemmings? Or perhaps WarCraft?
Does this mean I'll be able to hold more Bondage Faries stuff on my HD?
However, we have Microsoft now trying to get into an industry that is extremely well-established. Of their two major competitors, one has been in the business for over a decade, and the other for about half a decade. Beyond that, this isn't just a software endeavor any more; this also involves hardware, something that Microsoft has historically left alone. The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the Xbox is just an example of Microsoft's ego and cockiness running away with them. "We're Microsoft, and we can take over any industry we want." They might as well be trying to make movies or gasoline.
You can't really compare Microsoft to Sony when they were first starting to work on the PlayStation because Sony had two advantages that Microsoft didn't: Some previous console experience (the PSX was supposed to be a CD add-on to the SNES) and experience in the consumer electronics area (hardware). Hell, even Phillips and Panasonic were better prepared to enter this field than Microsoft.
The Xbox so far has no killer apps (nothing worth looking at in light of Final Fantasy and Zelda), has no serious hardware advantage to distinguish itself from its competition, and generally has no direction (even compared to PS2. "I'm a game console! No, wait, I'm a cheap PC! Nope, um, maybe a DVD player with extras?"). It's this kind of wishy-washiness that has allowed Nintendo to deflate Microsoft's months of hype in a single weekend.
There's just no way the nightmare scenarioes I'm seeing in these posts can come about. Microsoft is not going to dominate the console industry because, unlike IE, they have about 20 years of catching up to do, and they seem to be allergic to hard work.
In case you haven't looked at your calendar, it's May going on June. Release is in November, at which time they have to have several million of these puppies manufactured to put on store shelves. Why are they still using "pre-alpha" code? For all the time they've had to work on this and the little time they have left, they had better be "mostly finished" by now. If not, they run the risk of having game publishers putting out games that don't run in the current software environment.
If they have anything more than a few inconsitancies to tweak out, they're setting themselves up to get smacked around so much they'll make Virtual Boy look as popular as the NES. Us console gamers don't take kindly to software patches.
What? Your copy of The Matrix keeps on crashing your system? That's too bad. Metroid, anyone?
If they're waiting until the last second to churn out the software, they're doing a very good job of it...
"(2) the current dev. kits (the machines that the games were running on at E3) are literally a PC with a silver case."
The dev kits for the NGC are pretty much the same thing, and yet have had few apparent problems. By all accounts that I've read, the Nintendo booth is the heart of this year's show and all the Nintendo hardware has been put through the paces a lot more than PS2 and Xbox stuff.
However, does this mean that there's no actual working hardware at E3? And everybody thinks Nintendo will be the one delaying their system launch...
I think getting bitch-slapped by Nintendo will be a good learning experience for Microsoft.
I'm saying I can't tell if it's right in front of me or a little to the left until it's practically right on top of me. I'm saying that I can't see any visual cues to tell me if I'm drifting into the left lane or not. That I can't see if the road goes off to the right while I keep going straight. How can you expect me to try harder not to hit you when I have no idea if I'm going to hit you in the first place?
"Furthermore, if you honestly expect anyone to believe that a single headlight in DAYLIGHT is blinding you to the extent that you can't see other potential obsticals, then we should all be scared that you are on the road at all."
First off, most of the instances that come to mind with being blinded by a motorcycle were around 2 in the morning. However, if a headlight is bright enough to make me blink through my sunglasses (which HAS happened), it's still a hazard because I can't keep my eyes open.
"On the sixth page, it goes through the stats, state by state. I won't ask so much of you to do the math yourself, so I did it for you. This 54% is from only 22 states and D.C. where states have mandatory helmet laws. To try to impress upon you the significance of this, it means that 45% of the states account for 54% of the deaths."
First off, that alone means nothing. Population is not distributed evenly among the 50 states. Compare the results of the last popular presidential election to the number of states won by each candidate.
While you're stuck on math, let's look at the "Percent of total traffic fatalities" column. The average (mean) percent of total fatalities for the 23 states with manditory helmet laws (supercript a) is 4.99%. The average (mean) percent for the three states with no helmet law (supercript c) is 7.4% with a range of 1.9% (Mississippi) to 9.3% (DC) (median: 5.6%), with a range of 6.2% (Iowa) to 8.9% (Colorado) (median: 7.55%). This seems to suggest that you are more likely to die in a state with no helmet laws than one with manditory helmet laws.
To say the least, this data does not prove your cause/effect statement.
"But anyone that actually rides will tell you that many riders wear them anyway, even if it isn't mandatory, which would add to the number of fatalities of helmeted riders."
I'm willing to wager that it's balanced out by riders who wear no helmets in states that require them. Florida has manditory helmet laws, but the ratio of helmeted v. helmetless in Daytona Beach's Bike Week always seems to be around 50:50.
"No, you are correct, forward velocity at time of impact does not equal downward velocity of head on ground. But what about head against side of object being struck? The impact of body to ground is usually the second blow the rider receives, not the first."
Assuming a forward linear velocity of 70 MPH, and you are moving towards a wholly elastic surface, a helmet designed for impact at 12 MPH will protect you as long as you are travelling at an angle of less than about 10 degrees from paralell to the surface (ie. you're going forward, the surface is angled 10 degrees towards you). This assumes that the surface you are moving towards is stationary with respect to your 70 MPH body (say, a concrete barrier). This would only tend to happen if the road turns but you don't, as this is about the maximum angle a vehicle tends to move at while lane-changing on the interstate.
As for your example of a semi changing lanes into you, unless the semi has magic brakes and/or is trying to jacknife or you're zipping along at 140 MPH, the speed difference between the two of you will be MUCH less than 70 MPH. Even if the speed difference is as high as 20 MPH, the helmet will protect you up to angles of 37 degrees. An angle that big would involve the trucker putting himself in danger as well as you.
"And even at the second blow, while I have no statistical data to back me up, my own common sense tells me that the force of head to ground on the second blow will be greater than 12mph,"
A mass falling from a height of 5' will be travelling at around 12.23 MPH as it strikes the floor. The rest is just friction as you skid along.
Of course, if your center of mass is that high off the ground, you should consider sitting on your bike instead of standing on it.
"given that forward velocity on a highway would be between 45 and 70mph (depending on road being traveled),"
Velocity forward and velocity down are perpendicular and wholly independent. Rifle bullet and ejected casing hit the ground at the same time with the same downward velocity.
"Exactly my point, good sir. My position is neither for nor against helmets. What your original post concentrated on was your belief that all riders should be forced to wear helmets."
Actually, my point is that motorcyclists seem to care more about looking cool than actually worrying about such things as road rash, but that all seems moot now...
"The last damn thing we need is a government agency playing the part of mother-knows-best."
You're riding on government owned/funded/maintained roads (which is why they're able to require you to have a license and obey traffic laws while on those roads), and you will probably be treated in a government funded/maintained hospital if you get into a wreck. If you are going to be using their facilities, then there is no reason to think that they should not have any say in the way that you use them.
Um, no. This may be "OK" for desktop computers, but this is wholly unacceptable for a box where you aren't supposed to have any more interaction with the OS of the box beyond putting in a game and turning the thing on. And this is ESPECIALLY not acceptable for a box that's supposed to have several million manufactured in time for their November release date in the US.
What could this box possibly have been doing at the time of the crash?
For comparison purposes, when was the last time any other console crashed at a show?