I'm not sure how a law against filming actual violence would help with a situation of fabricated violence. (And if you say it should be illegal to film pretend violence, then that opens up a whole new set of problems!)
What you describe sounds more like an issue of defamation, just like slander and libel laws - I'm not sure how such laws apply to fabricated images/videos, but I find it hard to believe that such things would be legal, when conveying the same false and damaging message in text is illegal?
Also I'd say that the TV stations share much of the blame here.
And I'd question why, if the video is the only evidence, the case gets to a jury in the first place.
Why do articles about civil liberties in non-US countries always turn into a "We're better than you" US-vs-other-country argument?
It's not a competition. The US doing something bad isn't cancelled out by another country doing something bad - rather, that gives us two bad things. Those of us supporting freedom and civil liberties should be on the same side you know, whatever our nationality.
(And the European constitution actually gives the right to freedom of expression, though of course it isn't anywhere near as long established as the US' right to free speech.)
Except dell wasn't sold off and the brand purchased by someone else. Someone else who prob wanted to sell gaming PCs except didn't have any market leverage?
True, but let's suppose that Dell were bought by another company, who then decided to release PCs using the well known Dell brandname. Would people think that was strange, and claim it wasn't really a Dell?
Well, the Macintosh and PlayStation are both backward compatible with their predecessors.
I'm sure these new Commodore PCs will be backward compatible with the PCs that the old Commodore company produced...
A point that people seem to be missing is that this is the "Commodore" brand, not the "Commodore 64" brand (although admittedly it's not helped by them referring to the C64 in their announcement).
But yes, even as far as C64 compatibility is concerned, the NES/SNES would be a good example - it's possible through emulation, just the same as with the Mac/Playstation, it's just that the emulation software doesn't come as standard (though C64 emulators are free, at least).
Still, some brand names remain a bit constant. If you happened to be hanging around Apple headquarters, you might bump into Steve Jobs or Woz. The current Apple grew directly from the guys who were building the IIc in the 1980s. You could conceivably still find Shigeru Miyamoto running around the Nintendo offices, and you'd know that you're at the birthplace of the NES you were so glued to way back when. Hate Microsoft all you like, but you can still point to Gates and Ballmer and know that these are a couple of the guys responsible for that ubiquitous MS-DOS stuff you used to play with.
Sure, you can point to some companies where important guys are still around, but similarly there are other brands used where the original guys involved have long since left (Atari would be one example).
Brand loyalty can be a funny and superficial thing, and I'm not usually a practitioner of it myself, but I still prefer to see it used by those who earned it rather than third parties who scoop up names that others built.
As I do too - although there isn't just the case of brand loyalty, there's also brand awareness. Consider the free marketing they get with using this brand...
As another commenter on this story wrote, it feels pretty much like the retail version of domain squatting.
So this prob has as much to do with the original c64 et al as a jelly fish and a porn star.
I'd say it has as much to do with the original Commodore PCs (yes, they made PCs back then) as say, a modern Dell PC has to do with, I don't know, a Dell PC of 15 years ago?
Those Dell PCs are just PCs with a Dell sticker on!!
I loved my C64 and my Amigas but, really, isn't this just the retail version of domain squatting?
No, because unlike domain squatting, this company have a legal right to use the name Commodore (at least, I presume).
The domain name equivalent would be when a company buys a domain and trademark to use for their product, whether or not it's related to the original usage - but oh wait, that happens all the time in business.
The current owners of the Commodore logo and brand name have about as much connection with the people who made the C64 and VIC20 as the current telephone companies have with Alexander Graham Bell.
Welcome to business. This is true with an awful lot of brandnames. They get bought and sold (e.g., in the UK, the cable company NTL recently renamed to Virgin Media, but it's still basically NTL and not Virgin). But then, even within the same company, over a period of decades you often won't have the same people working there anymore, so it's hard to see there's really a connection, plus of course, even whole companies can be bought and sold, not to mention made public, so often the "current owners" have nothing to do with the people who originally started it.
I suppose I can see why geeks would be more likely to prefer that brandnames were used on technical similarities rather than for reasons of marketing. Although then again, no one seems to care about reusing the Macintosh brand for different operating systems, or reusing brandnames like "Playstation" for completely different consoles - for some reason it only seems to be the Commodore (and perhaps also Amiga) brands which people complain about here.
I fail to see the point in this product being branded Commodore. It's another PC.
You do realise that there have been Commodore PCs before - in that Commodore when it existed as a company made PCs?
There was a lot more to the Commodore brand than the Commodore 64, and all this is is reusing the brand. Is it pointless to use such a seemingly old brand? Well, it nonetheless seems to be getting them lots of extra publicity, which is really the whole point of using well known brandnames...
And as someone else pointed out, this isn't really any different to using the Macintosh brand for more than one platform (multiple CPU changes, and more notably, two entirely different operating systems). Apple did it because they knew that a "Mac" would have better chance than a new "NeXT".
Really, if GPUs and sound chips are sufficient for a comparison to the Amiga's chipset, then PCs have been doing that for at least as long as Macs.
It's not clear to me why this article is about something more Amiga-like than what modern computers already have (especially since GPUs are fully programmable). The difference about this news is that the chips can be put on the motherboard via a standard socket - but it was never the case with the Amiga that you could plug in chips you wanted, you just had the entire chipset hardwired to the motherboard, no different to a chipset on a modern PC.
I have never seen anything to suggest that athiests are inherently moral. In fact, there is little reason to believe such to be the case.
The point is that they isn't necessarily more or less moral than theists, but either way they have come up with their own moral code without taking it from a single religion.
Labelling "the thing which started the Universe" as "God" is just wordplay, no better than defining "God" to be "the pencil sitting on my desk". But clearly when most religious people talk about God, they mean a lot more than that.
After all, we *knew* the earth was flat until we took a better look at it
Note that we've known the earth was round since ancient times, and there was never a scientific consensus or theory that the earth was flat.
You may as well believe - if religion is right then you get a place in the afterlife. If not, by your own argument, what have you lost?
No this one again. You only get a place in the afterlife if that particular belief is right - but instead, it might be that it's believers who roast in hell.
The big question is: what if? There could be a God, there could be seven, there could be millions, one for each grain of sand. Regardless of your personal beliefs, there is no way to know for sure.
I don't see that what you say is relevant to the post you replied to, indeed, it backs it up - that we don't know for sure is all the more reason why we shouldn't be putting so much faith and power into religion.
Religion is not "what if", and the OP did not suggest that philosophy on "what if" was wrong - the problem is that religion is "This is true and anything else is wrong".
Note, the post was attacking religion, and not saying that there doesn't exist a god. And the claim was that religion breeds ignorance - whether or not a particular religious claim might coincidentally be true or not is beside the point; the claim is that people are led to believe things "because some book said so", and disregard processes such as evidence and reason.
That it's a "licence" doesn't mean it also isn't a tax. A tax doesn't have to be paid by everyone - there are many taxes which only have to be paid by some people. That's like saying income tax isn't compulsory because you don't have to have a job, or council tax isn't compulsory because you don't have to own a property...
It's a tax AND a licence. And, like most taxes, it's compulsory for people who fulfil a certain criterion (in this case, owning a TV).
The only real difference is that the money doesn't go to the Government as you say, although this isn't that different to any other taxation money which the Government hands to private companies for services. The BBC still have the Government backing to be able to enforce it (clearly, no other TV company has the right to "licence" its services this way).
It's a compulsory tax on anyone with a TV - I think it's reasonable to say that.
"Subscription" on the other hand is misleading, as you are not choosing to subscribe to the BBC's services, it's something that has to be paid for a TV whether you watch the BBC or not. At the least it would be a compulsory subscription for when you buy a TV.
I'm not against the TV licence, but the summary is quite accurate and I see no reason to use misleading words to try to pretend it's just like any other TV service you can choose to have.
This just points out a major chink in wikipedia's armour: that it's largely predicated on unverified trust.
I would say the exact opposite - the point of Wikipedia is that it is based on verifiable information, and not "it's true because I say so and I'm an expert". You can't have it both ways and criticise Wikipedia for not being written by experts, and that there was a fake expert - if the former is true, it doesn't matter if an "expert" turns out to be fake.
This should be a reminder that we can't trust what someone says, even if they claim to be an expert, and instead judge what they say on whether they can back it up - which strengthens Wikipedia's position, compared with sources which rely on being "authoritative".
This would be far more of a problem if it happened for Citizendium for example, since that is I believe built on the idea it is edited by experts.
"Terror laws don't work" where as the last full scale terror attack on our country was 5 years ago.
So if there was a more recent attack, do you honestly think the response would have been "Well, these laws obviously didn't work, let's repeal them"? Of course not - instead it would be "proof" that yet more laws are needed.
The problem is that every time there is an attack, it's used as argument for more laws - the burden is upon you to show that these laws are working, and going a period of time without any attacks is not sufficient when the same happened before the laws were brought in.
"Well the world hates us" and you look again and there hasn't been an attack on US soil since 9/11.
Actually it's the Bush administration which tells us we're in a War on Terror and how dangerous the world is now. I'd be the first to disagree with this.
On the other hand, a lot of the world hates the Bush administration, but political views have nothing to do with supporting terrorism.
I'm not convinced there are many people trying to mute the basic idea of God - obviously a God who simply made everything happen according to the way science observes is entirely unfalsifiable. But that's missing the point - the point is that many religions and religious people believe a lot more than merely a God who works in the background. It's more that people are against the ideas that are disproved by science (such as intelligent design), or the power that organised religion wields (such as influencing political or moral issues based on no argument other than "I think God says so").
I'm not sure what the issue is here. Citizens entering the United States are expected to abide by our rules and regulations for entry (fairly draconian at this point i'm sure). How is it not fair that other countries not hold our citizens to the same standards?
Because two wrongs don't make a right.
Government A makes thinks worse for Citizen B. Government C responds by making things worse for Citizen D. Nope, I don't see how that's fair - Governments A and C end up increasing their powers, and citizens B and D lose out.
Canadians are already being screened this way entering the US, why are Americans upset when Canada starts doing the same thing?
Perhaps the upset Americans weren't ones which supported the US introducing screening?
It's not tit-for-tat. Tit-for-tat would be only introducing these measures for those who supported them in the US, or the US politicians - now that would be a great way to protest. But two countries both introducing measures which restrict each other's citizens just harms citizens from both countries. And I doubt there's any hint of "revenge" here - I'm sure both Governments are loving being able to tighten controls and share information.
If you don't like it, well, don't do things to limit that option for yourself, or visit some other place. Their country, their rules.
I'm sorry, I think I missed the part where it said that every Canadian agrees with these rules?
This argument pops up everytime there are restrictions on entry (e.g., fingerprinting). Not everyone is a xenophobe you know - if my own country were to introduce such things, I'd be against it, yet the fact that it's "my country" would then strangely give me little say in the matter.
I want people to be able to visit me without being hassled. Also when one country starts doing such things, other countries often follow, so citizens of all countries end up being affected. A world where movement between countries becomes harder is not one which I want, and I don't see how parrotting "their country, their rules" has any relevance to this issue.
So Windows is cheap when you compare to... Windows, and other bloated OSs of the 90s such as OS/2.
Some perspective would be that I happily ran AmigaOS in 2MB (in fact, the entire computer cost less than the amount it would cost to buy the memory to make Windows or OS/2 useable...)
As I have said, it is clear that if we want to travel abroad, we will soon have no choice but to have a biometric passport. We estimate that the cost of biometric passports will account for 70% of the cost of the combined passports/id cards. The additional cost of the ID cards is expected to be less than £30 or £3 a year for their 10-year lifespan.
We already have biometric passports in the UK - and that has already given a hefty increase in the price.
As for his whinging that the price of an ID card is being conflated with the price of a passport, perhaps the Government should stop conflating the needs for a passport with the needs for a compulsory ID card and national database?
Oh, and even a £30 price for an ID card is above what most people would be willing to pay (see http://www.ipsos-mori.com/polls/2004/detica-top.sh tml - although amusingly that's from a poll highly biased in favour of the Government's plans).
A single email across the Internet is a bad idea. It's much better to have to sign up to a new email account for every server where you want to contact someone. With a single email account, they can track everyone that you are emailing.
Well, I wouldn't use OpenID for my online banking, but that's taking it to extreme. This is useful for various forum and blogs sites like LiveJournal and Slashdot. I guess since you're posting anonymously, even that bothers you, but the rest of us aren't quite that paranoid.
The situation is analogous to email and IM systems. Commenting on forums, along with IM systems for the most part, is like a system where you need to sign up for a new email account just because the other person is on a different server. For those of us who don't like living in the bad old days on the Internet, things like Jabber and OpenID try to solve this. No one seems to complain about the privacy issues when it comes to email or Jabber.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure how a law against filming actual violence would help with a situation of fabricated violence. (And if you say it should be illegal to film pretend violence, then that opens up a whole new set of problems!)
What you describe sounds more like an issue of defamation, just like slander and libel laws - I'm not sure how such laws apply to fabricated images/videos, but I find it hard to believe that such things would be legal, when conveying the same false and damaging message in text is illegal?
Also I'd say that the TV stations share much of the blame here.
And I'd question why, if the video is the only evidence, the case gets to a jury in the first place.
Why do articles about civil liberties in non-US countries always turn into a "We're better than you" US-vs-other-country argument?
It's not a competition. The US doing something bad isn't cancelled out by another country doing something bad - rather, that gives us two bad things. Those of us supporting freedom and civil liberties should be on the same side you know, whatever our nationality.
(And the European constitution actually gives the right to freedom of expression, though of course it isn't anywhere near as long established as the US' right to free speech.)
Except dell wasn't sold off and the brand purchased by someone else. Someone else who prob wanted to sell gaming PCs except didn't have any market leverage?
True, but let's suppose that Dell were bought by another company, who then decided to release PCs using the well known Dell brandname. Would people think that was strange, and claim it wasn't really a Dell?
Well, the Macintosh and PlayStation are both backward compatible with their predecessors.
I'm sure these new Commodore PCs will be backward compatible with the PCs that the old Commodore company produced...
A point that people seem to be missing is that this is the "Commodore" brand, not the "Commodore 64" brand (although admittedly it's not helped by them referring to the C64 in their announcement).
But yes, even as far as C64 compatibility is concerned, the NES/SNES would be a good example - it's possible through emulation, just the same as with the Mac/Playstation, it's just that the emulation software doesn't come as standard (though C64 emulators are free, at least).
Still, some brand names remain a bit constant. If you happened to be hanging around Apple headquarters, you might bump into Steve Jobs or Woz. The current Apple grew directly from the guys who were building the IIc in the 1980s. You could conceivably still find Shigeru Miyamoto running around the Nintendo offices, and you'd know that you're at the birthplace of the NES you were so glued to way back when. Hate Microsoft all you like, but you can still point to Gates and Ballmer and know that these are a couple of the guys responsible for that ubiquitous MS-DOS stuff you used to play with.
Sure, you can point to some companies where important guys are still around, but similarly there are other brands used where the original guys involved have long since left (Atari would be one example).
Brand loyalty can be a funny and superficial thing, and I'm not usually a practitioner of it myself, but I still prefer to see it used by those who earned it rather than third parties who scoop up names that others built.
As I do too - although there isn't just the case of brand loyalty, there's also brand awareness. Consider the free marketing they get with using this brand...
As another commenter on this story wrote, it feels pretty much like the retail version of domain squatting.
See my reply to that comment.
So this prob has as much to do with the original c64 et al as a jelly fish and a porn star.
I'd say it has as much to do with the original Commodore PCs (yes, they made PCs back then) as say, a modern Dell PC has to do with, I don't know, a Dell PC of 15 years ago?
Those Dell PCs are just PCs with a Dell sticker on!!
I loved my C64 and my Amigas but, really, isn't this just the retail version of domain squatting?
No, because unlike domain squatting, this company have a legal right to use the name Commodore (at least, I presume).
The domain name equivalent would be when a company buys a domain and trademark to use for their product, whether or not it's related to the original usage - but oh wait, that happens all the time in business.
The current owners of the Commodore logo and brand name have about as much connection with the people who made the C64 and VIC20 as the current telephone companies have with Alexander Graham Bell.
Welcome to business. This is true with an awful lot of brandnames. They get bought and sold (e.g., in the UK, the cable company NTL recently renamed to Virgin Media, but it's still basically NTL and not Virgin). But then, even within the same company, over a period of decades you often won't have the same people working there anymore, so it's hard to see there's really a connection, plus of course, even whole companies can be bought and sold, not to mention made public, so often the "current owners" have nothing to do with the people who originally started it.
I suppose I can see why geeks would be more likely to prefer that brandnames were used on technical similarities rather than for reasons of marketing. Although then again, no one seems to care about reusing the Macintosh brand for different operating systems, or reusing brandnames like "Playstation" for completely different consoles - for some reason it only seems to be the Commodore (and perhaps also Amiga) brands which people complain about here.
I fail to see the point in this product being branded Commodore. It's another PC.
You do realise that there have been Commodore PCs before - in that Commodore when it existed as a company made PCs?
There was a lot more to the Commodore brand than the Commodore 64, and all this is is reusing the brand. Is it pointless to use such a seemingly old brand? Well, it nonetheless seems to be getting them lots of extra publicity, which is really the whole point of using well known brandnames...
And as someone else pointed out, this isn't really any different to using the Macintosh brand for more than one platform (multiple CPU changes, and more notably, two entirely different operating systems). Apple did it because they knew that a "Mac" would have better chance than a new "NeXT".
Yes, I did - if not, perhaps you would care to explain to the rest of us rather than playing guessing games...
Or get a PC.
Really, if GPUs and sound chips are sufficient for a comparison to the Amiga's chipset, then PCs have been doing that for at least as long as Macs.
It's not clear to me why this article is about something more Amiga-like than what modern computers already have (especially since GPUs are fully programmable). The difference about this news is that the chips can be put on the motherboard via a standard socket - but it was never the case with the Amiga that you could plug in chips you wanted, you just had the entire chipset hardwired to the motherboard, no different to a chipset on a modern PC.
I have never seen anything to suggest that athiests are inherently moral. In fact, there is little reason to believe such to be the case.
The point is that they isn't necessarily more or less moral than theists, but either way they have come up with their own moral code without taking it from a single religion.
What makes you claim that they aren't moral?
Lets call this unknown thing 'God'.
Labelling "the thing which started the Universe" as "God" is just wordplay, no better than defining "God" to be "the pencil sitting on my desk". But clearly when most religious people talk about God, they mean a lot more than that.
After all, we *knew* the earth was flat until we took a better look at it
Note that we've known the earth was round since ancient times, and there was never a scientific consensus or theory that the earth was flat.
You may as well believe - if religion is right then you get a place in the afterlife. If not, by your own argument, what have you lost?
No this one again. You only get a place in the afterlife if that particular belief is right - but instead, it might be that it's believers who roast in hell.
The big question is: what if? There could be a God, there could be seven, there could be millions, one for each grain of sand. Regardless of your personal beliefs, there is no way to know for sure.
I don't see that what you say is relevant to the post you replied to, indeed, it backs it up - that we don't know for sure is all the more reason why we shouldn't be putting so much faith and power into religion.
Religion is not "what if", and the OP did not suggest that philosophy on "what if" was wrong - the problem is that religion is "This is true and anything else is wrong".
Note, the post was attacking religion, and not saying that there doesn't exist a god. And the claim was that religion breeds ignorance - whether or not a particular religious claim might coincidentally be true or not is beside the point; the claim is that people are led to believe things "because some book said so", and disregard processes such as evidence and reason.
That it's a "licence" doesn't mean it also isn't a tax. A tax doesn't have to be paid by everyone - there are many taxes which only have to be paid by some people. That's like saying income tax isn't compulsory because you don't have to have a job, or council tax isn't compulsory because you don't have to own a property...
It's a tax AND a licence. And, like most taxes, it's compulsory for people who fulfil a certain criterion (in this case, owning a TV).
The only real difference is that the money doesn't go to the Government as you say, although this isn't that different to any other taxation money which the Government hands to private companies for services. The BBC still have the Government backing to be able to enforce it (clearly, no other TV company has the right to "licence" its services this way).
It's a compulsory tax on anyone with a TV - I think it's reasonable to say that.
"Subscription" on the other hand is misleading, as you are not choosing to subscribe to the BBC's services, it's something that has to be paid for a TV whether you watch the BBC or not. At the least it would be a compulsory subscription for when you buy a TV.
I'm not against the TV licence, but the summary is quite accurate and I see no reason to use misleading words to try to pretend it's just like any other TV service you can choose to have.
This just points out a major chink in wikipedia's armour: that it's largely predicated on unverified trust.
I would say the exact opposite - the point of Wikipedia is that it is based on verifiable information, and not "it's true because I say so and I'm an expert". You can't have it both ways and criticise Wikipedia for not being written by experts, and that there was a fake expert - if the former is true, it doesn't matter if an "expert" turns out to be fake.
This should be a reminder that we can't trust what someone says, even if they claim to be an expert, and instead judge what they say on whether they can back it up - which strengthens Wikipedia's position, compared with sources which rely on being "authoritative".
This would be far more of a problem if it happened for Citizendium for example, since that is I believe built on the idea it is edited by experts.
"Terror laws don't work" where as the last full scale terror attack on our country was 5 years ago.
So if there was a more recent attack, do you honestly think the response would have been "Well, these laws obviously didn't work, let's repeal them"? Of course not - instead it would be "proof" that yet more laws are needed.
The problem is that every time there is an attack, it's used as argument for more laws - the burden is upon you to show that these laws are working, and going a period of time without any attacks is not sufficient when the same happened before the laws were brought in.
"Well the world hates us" and you look again and there hasn't been an attack on US soil since 9/11.
Actually it's the Bush administration which tells us we're in a War on Terror and how dangerous the world is now. I'd be the first to disagree with this.
On the other hand, a lot of the world hates the Bush administration, but political views have nothing to do with supporting terrorism.
I'm not convinced there are many people trying to mute the basic idea of God - obviously a God who simply made everything happen according to the way science observes is entirely unfalsifiable. But that's missing the point - the point is that many religions and religious people believe a lot more than merely a God who works in the background. It's more that people are against the ideas that are disproved by science (such as intelligent design), or the power that organised religion wields (such as influencing political or moral issues based on no argument other than "I think God says so").
I'm not sure what the issue is here. Citizens entering the United States are expected to abide by our rules and regulations for entry (fairly draconian at this point i'm sure). How is it not fair that other countries not hold our citizens to the same standards?
Because two wrongs don't make a right.
Government A makes thinks worse for Citizen B. Government C responds by making things worse for Citizen D. Nope, I don't see how that's fair - Governments A and C end up increasing their powers, and citizens B and D lose out.
Canadians are already being screened this way entering the US, why are Americans upset when Canada starts doing the same thing?
Perhaps the upset Americans weren't ones which supported the US introducing screening?
It's not tit-for-tat. Tit-for-tat would be only introducing these measures for those who supported them in the US, or the US politicians - now that would be a great way to protest. But two countries both introducing measures which restrict each other's citizens just harms citizens from both countries. And I doubt there's any hint of "revenge" here - I'm sure both Governments are loving being able to tighten controls and share information.
If you don't like it, well, don't do things to limit that option for yourself, or visit some other place. Their country, their rules.
I'm sorry, I think I missed the part where it said that every Canadian agrees with these rules?
This argument pops up everytime there are restrictions on entry (e.g., fingerprinting). Not everyone is a xenophobe you know - if my own country were to introduce such things, I'd be against it, yet the fact that it's "my country" would then strangely give me little say in the matter.
I want people to be able to visit me without being hassled. Also when one country starts doing such things, other countries often follow, so citizens of all countries end up being affected. A world where movement between countries becomes harder is not one which I want, and I don't see how parrotting "their country, their rules" has any relevance to this issue.
So Windows is cheap when you compare to ... Windows, and other bloated OSs of the 90s such as OS/2.
Some perspective would be that I happily ran AmigaOS in 2MB (in fact, the entire computer cost less than the amount it would cost to buy the memory to make Windows or OS/2 useable...)
As I have said, it is clear that if we want to travel abroad, we will soon have no choice but to have a biometric passport. We estimate that the cost of biometric passports will account for 70% of the cost of the combined passports/id cards. The additional cost of the ID cards is expected to be less than £30 or £3 a year for their 10-year lifespan.
h tml - although amusingly that's from a poll highly biased in favour of the Government's plans).
We already have biometric passports in the UK - and that has already given a hefty increase in the price.
As for his whinging that the price of an ID card is being conflated with the price of a passport, perhaps the Government should stop conflating the needs for a passport with the needs for a compulsory ID card and national database?
Oh, and even a £30 price for an ID card is above what most people would be willing to pay (see http://www.ipsos-mori.com/polls/2004/detica-top.s
A single email across the Internet is a bad idea. It's much better to have to sign up to a new email account for every server where you want to contact someone. With a single email account, they can track everyone that you are emailing.
Well, I wouldn't use OpenID for my online banking, but that's taking it to extreme. This is useful for various forum and blogs sites like LiveJournal and Slashdot. I guess since you're posting anonymously, even that bothers you, but the rest of us aren't quite that paranoid.
The situation is analogous to email and IM systems. Commenting on forums, along with IM systems for the most part, is like a system where you need to sign up for a new email account just because the other person is on a different server. For those of us who don't like living in the bad old days on the Internet, things like Jabber and OpenID try to solve this. No one seems to complain about the privacy issues when it comes to email or Jabber.