if I was told if I spit on a sidewalk I'd go to prison for life, I'd be sure not to spit on the sidewalk
I'd realize that I live in a totalitarian society and take steps to change it. But maybe that is just because of too many brainwashing film-strips in elementary school where they talk about radical hippy ideas like justice, freedom, and independence.
So au contraire, I think the fucktard got off disproportionately lightly
I think you are making a logical fallacy. A murderer removes time from a person's life. A spammer wastes the time of people who are checking their e-mail inbox without running a spam filter. If you don't want to waste that time, you can just run a spam filter, or not check your e-mail.
Spam is, arguably, a freedom of speech issue. And while commercial speech does not have quite as much protection as other forms of expression, I think this sentence was just an attempt to "make an example" of this spammer and try to dissuade others. That is not justice, it is people using force pragmatically to make their lives more convenient. This sort of comparison is degrading, and insulting to everyone who has lost a loved one to violent crime. I suppose you want to start calling them "e-mail rapists" or something too.
I've heard plenty of self-proclaimed christians make jokes about this, especially amongst law-enforcement personnel. They are people who believe in Jesus, go to church, and listen to all the hate-mongering and fear spread around our country. History will look back on our culture as ridiculously backwards and ignoble. They were the people that copied the idea of democracy from the Roman empire, but were so obsessed with greed, that they based their lives around it and glorified the greediest among them. Oh, and their way of dealing with people who did not fit in (about 1% of their society) was to lock them in small cells and anally rape them. They prohibited all sorts of random things, like saying certain words or smoking particular plants. They were a society defined by cowardice and greed, and are usually considered the cause of the 21st century apocalypse, that our species barely survived.
Of course, if you want the numbers to be even more meaningful you should reference the cost of the systems, not today, but the length of time it takes to build them before today. Right? Of course there are advantages to quick deployment that in many cases are just as important as cost, so perhaps you should also add to the cost, the price of hiring out comparable computing resources for the time it takes to build them. Of course all of this is moot since the Big Mac cluster was so much cheaper AND faster to build than anything else in the top 10 it wins any non-biased comparison hands down. (Given that your goal is to cheaply and quickly develop a cluster for a purpose for which the LINPACK test is a good benchmark.)
so it appears to me that the Big Mac, on the whole, is not very significant.
Maybe you are trolling, but, do you really propose that the significance of any scientific endeavor should be judged by whether or not is is copied? John Smith demonstrated a car that runs on potatoes and can be built for only $500. Still, no one has copied him so his design is not significant. Your statement does not sound very "scientific" to me. That said, There are several institutions copying the design, including several DOD projects. More importantly, you know that Virginia Tech exists, which I doubt more than 1 in 1000 Slashdotters knew before they created the Big Mac. I'd say that they are successful all around.
Actually, few applications behave like the Linpack benchmark. But if you want to do those things, like render video or compile genetic sequences the Linpack is just fine as a benchmark. It is certainly not the be-all end-all. I think the reason for it's popularity is that it is a single number that can be easily measured. No one is interested in watching a race where they calculate the height of each person, the time in which they finished, their mass, their top speed, and their wind resistance, and try to give an accurate count as to who did the most work in the least time. Most people just want to know who got to the finish first.
Obviously, if you have job you want to get done, you will need to look at all the options for accomplishing that goal. PR should not play a big factor in your decision. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. Prior to the Virginia tech cluster, most people would never consider deploying a cluster of Apple's as a possible solution. Maybe the Linpack is just PR, and not meaningful for the majority of cases, but to my mind, it was at least PR that accomplished something useful, and challanged a number of prejudices.
Here is where I see this going. With collusion among retailers, and the ever ongoing consolidation, soon you will be profiled by every store you go in to. There will be 'saver cards," "saver clubs," "extra special saver coupons," etc. all tied to your profile. By the year 2020 expect to hear, "I'm sorry sir, your IQ is too high. We'd rather not do business with you since you could unfairly take advantage of our sales. Thank you, have a good day."
The army does, however, have remote control bots with shotguns. I remember seeing them as long ago as 1992. The EOD (Explosive Ordinance Disposal) guys use them to set off unexploded shells that they don't want to try diffusing. They were not pump shotguns, just single shot 12 gauge.
The negotiation port remains the same. You just pair traffic between hosts on any other ports that happen after a negotiation on the standard port and lump them into the BitTorrent traffic. Nobody (that I know of) does deep packet inspection on a large enough chunk of the core to get meaningful numbers.
Well, there certainly are some drawbacks to "blogs" as a news source. First and foremost, few of them have any professional journalists spending all their time searching out and writing up content. Secondly, their reputations are not as important, thus articles that have little or no credibility may still get posted (no one is worried about losing the public trust). Third, the quality of writing is, generally, much less professional and no one has copy editors read over their posts.
On the other hand, blogs have some serious advantages. Strength of numbers is one of them. No media outlet has as many eyes looking or as many fingers typing as Slashdot does. The lack of a need for credibility may allow for stories that other news sources would never run, blogs allow the readers to be the judge of a story's merit. Audience targeting, the internet allows for news to be targeted, and even custom fitted to a particular person's interests. If you really want to read about fishing, or chess, or explosives, there is a blog out there for you. Finally, blogs allow for audience participation. If you want to know more about a particular subject, or have specific knowledge of a topic, you can jump into the fray, and either learn specific things, or teach others.
Look at this article. It was not balanced, nor particularly well written, or thought out. Not many people would be interested in the article itself, but a blog discussing the article can be both meaningful, and entertaining. I don't think traditional news is going to vanish anytime soon, but the author's flippant criticism is poorly thought out. Blogs have a lot to offer.
I often have data on my machine that I don't want others looking at, financial info, a book I'm writing that is embarrassingly bad, etc. I just stick them in encrypted disk images. It also helps me keep work and personal info separate. Typing in a password once to access each directory is not too much of an inconvenience.
I think you may be confusing willful killing with responsive aggression. The article you linked to mostly discussed the former, but it is the latter that is prevalent in a mugging type situation. When attacked or threatened people usually respond with a fight/flight response. Adrenaline and a variety of other chemicals hit you hard along with the emotions of fear, excitement, and sometimes anger. Police officers train to fire after running a few miles and doing some very quick pushups, to simulate this shaky, high energy, adrenaline filled condition. Often it is all too easy for a person to react with violence in this situation, but without experience people react quickly, but crudely. It is not uncommon for persons to engage in a gunfight at distances less than ten yards, but for both parties to miss with every shot. This even applies to experienced marksmen. Remaining calm, obtaining cover when possible, and aiming are key factors in surviving such a situation.
Will that be you walking home from the pub, or the mugger who jumps you?
I've been in a few fights, and I know how I react. I've never had an qualms about going for the gusto and reacting quickly and with as much force as possible. Partly this is a matter of training and practice. On the other hand, I have great difficulty imagining myself in an army and shooting enemy soldiers across a field. I would balk at shooting people I did not know, because someone else told me to. If forced into such a situation, I might kill to defend myself, but I would most likely just desert. Wars are the ultimate stupidity. Despite what seems to be the popular sentiment in the U.S. today, I do not believe any war is justified. I imagine sixty years ago, when ethics and morality were fundamentals many soldiers would have felt the same way.
Guns don't kill people, people *with* guns kill people
Maybe so but they make people pretty damned effective at it. As for the other choices, well, they are pretty poor
Take a look at the statistics for assault in great britain. Guns simply shift power. Instead of the biggest, strongest, most aggressive, longest armed person, survival goes to the fastest, most accurate, most cool-headed person.
As to your other points, knives are often the choice of a professional killer because they are quiet, concealable, and frightening. Bows can be fired bloody fast and guns require just as much skill to hit anything. Fists and bricks and chairs and everything else can be used to kill people, and often are. Why don't you look to why people are killing each other rather than what they are using?
California recently banned.50 caliber breech loading rifles. These rifles are very high power, long range, and effective. This will stop exactly zero crimes. Why? Because this type of gun has never been used in a violent crime in the U.S. The only crime it has been used in was vandalism (shooting signs). The reason for this is simple, people who own guns costing more than a thousand dollars, don't generally commit violent crimes. That is because violent crime is usually committed out of desperation by poor, angry, young people (usually men). I'm not stereotyping, those are the recorded statistics. Passing more laws that say people can't use things/have things/do things that enable them to break other laws don't work. If they are already desperate enough to break the law, they won't care if they are breaking two or three or four laws. That is just paperwork on how long the police can lock them up. These laws do, however, take rights away from non-criminals, important rights, like the ability to defend oneself.
I'm not sure about the reliability of these rings, but assuming that they are very reliable, having a gun that only I can fire would not bother me at all. I reduces the risk of the gun being turned on me, in a struggle. If my girlfriend wants to shoot someone after I am incapacitated, she can just use her own gun. I think that you are overestimating the chances that you will be injured/incapacitated and that someone else will need your gun to save you, compared to the risks of someone grabbing your gun and then shooting you with it. Both are pretty improbable. In any case, without some trustworthy testimony as to the reliability of these devices, it would be foolish to install one.
As far as electronic, biometric sensors go, they are a very dumb idea. I cannot imagine one reliable enough can be manufactured given our current technology. Biometrics are a bad idea as a primary means of identification, having an unchangeable key, is ridiculous from a engineering perspective, once it is compromised, you are unable to recover. All it does is provide a speedbump and a false sense of security. I foresee many innocent people will be locked up because of a foolish trust in this untrustworthy idea.
Have you ever used such a device? I have seen them advertised in the past and often wondered about their reliability. I own one of the short list of firearms they can equip with these devices, but have been unable to find anyone who has actually used one. I'm concerned that it would not be reliable enough.
I did not forget anything. I just don't see that traffic on the chunk of internet I am monitoring. Ny numbers are drastically different, showing bittorrent with only about 5%. Since the article does not give any source for their numbers, I'm inclined to believe they are wrong. I just trust my numbers over some anonymous person's since I know my methodology and sample size, and not thiers.
Of course they are also much safer and cleaner than oil plants. For that matter, workers are 10 times more likely to suffer from radiation poisoning working in a coal fired plant as a nuclear one. No, the real difficulty with nuclear energy is portability. Gas tanks are proven technologies. Batteries still have no where near the efficiency they need to make powering larger devices (cars) practical. Nuclear reactors, are also somewhat large and cumbersome.
If I got busted for piracy, sure I'd be pissed off, but I wouldn't think it unfair, any more than I'd be annoyed at getting a traffic ticket for driving 10kph over the speed limit, it's annoying, but a fair cop.
Both of the crimes you listed are interesting in that while there is arguable, potential harm in committing them, there is no concrete harm. For example, speeding might be dangerous, and might cause an accident. Is that why speeding laws are enforced? Nope. It is purely a fund raiser for the police/country/state/reservation or whatever. The mayor of New York even acknowledged this and suggested that it was "in poor taste" to ticket off duty police officers. This instance is not a safety issue, or it would be illegal to cause an accident through recklessness, which it is.
The second crime you mention is pirating movies. Does it cause harm? The potential harm is lost sales. Not quite in the same ballpark as endangering people's lives. It is threatening the livelihoods of those in the movie industry. This is probably unethical, but I have no sympathy for an industry that relies upon draconian copyright laws for their income. The laws they have bribed our lawmakers to pass are so sickeningly unethical and unconstitutional that it makes me angry just thinking about it. Entire generations have been stripped of their literary and musical heritage, in the name of increased profit margins. I can think of few ways to intellectually bankrupt our country faster than what the media companies have done. I say, rob them blind, all you want. It does not make me feel one bit sorry for them.
Cell phones, on the other hand, are more expensive and less reliable.
Hmm, well I'll give you the reliable part, but the reason I do not have a land-line is because it was more expensive than a cell phone. That is because the monopolies, once privatized, gouge you for as much as possible without having to worry about competition. Just watch as the U.S. falls further behind in broadband, cell phone coverage, wireless internet access, power generation/distribution, and other technologies as the result of these policies. If only we citizens could band together and give politicians large amounts of money, so that they would work in our best interests.
it wasn't an outside possibility since they didn't find any evidence of genetic tampering.
Just because they did not find any evidence, does not make it so. This was probably the result of natural selection, but there is no way to determine that with certainty. It is just highly unlikely that it was modified using completely new methods. I think "outside possibility" meaning possible but highly unlikely, was a very apt description.
you'd probably want to disable some services and close some ports
There are no network services enabled by default on Mac OS X. I suppose it does not hurt to turn the firewall on, and there are plenty of minor tweaks that could be done. My point, however, is that you can just buy a mac and plug it in, without worrying too much about security. This is not the case with any windows distribution I have seen. It is true for some linux distributions I have seen.
Actually it was ported from the mac. And you forgot Halo, and many others. Support for games on the mac is always behind windows, but if games are your primary use for your computer, maybe a console would be more suitable (and cheaper).
Slashdot Mirror
if I was told if I spit on a sidewalk I'd go to prison for life, I'd be sure not to spit on the sidewalk
I'd realize that I live in a totalitarian society and take steps to change it. But maybe that is just because of too many brainwashing film-strips in elementary school where they talk about radical hippy ideas like justice, freedom, and independence.
So au contraire, I think the fucktard got off disproportionately lightly
I think you are making a logical fallacy. A murderer removes time from a person's life. A spammer wastes the time of people who are checking their e-mail inbox without running a spam filter. If you don't want to waste that time, you can just run a spam filter, or not check your e-mail.
Spam is, arguably, a freedom of speech issue. And while commercial speech does not have quite as much protection as other forms of expression, I think this sentence was just an attempt to "make an example" of this spammer and try to dissuade others. That is not justice, it is people using force pragmatically to make their lives more convenient. This sort of comparison is degrading, and insulting to everyone who has lost a loved one to violent crime. I suppose you want to start calling them "e-mail rapists" or something too.
I've heard plenty of self-proclaimed christians make jokes about this, especially amongst law-enforcement personnel. They are people who believe in Jesus, go to church, and listen to all the hate-mongering and fear spread around our country. History will look back on our culture as ridiculously backwards and ignoble. They were the people that copied the idea of democracy from the Roman empire, but were so obsessed with greed, that they based their lives around it and glorified the greediest among them. Oh, and their way of dealing with people who did not fit in (about 1% of their society) was to lock them in small cells and anally rape them. They prohibited all sorts of random things, like saying certain words or smoking particular plants. They were a society defined by cowardice and greed, and are usually considered the cause of the 21st century apocalypse, that our species barely survived.
Of course, if you want the numbers to be even more meaningful you should reference the cost of the systems, not today, but the length of time it takes to build them before today. Right? Of course there are advantages to quick deployment that in many cases are just as important as cost, so perhaps you should also add to the cost, the price of hiring out comparable computing resources for the time it takes to build them. Of course all of this is moot since the Big Mac cluster was so much cheaper AND faster to build than anything else in the top 10 it wins any non-biased comparison hands down. (Given that your goal is to cheaply and quickly develop a cluster for a purpose for which the LINPACK test is a good benchmark.)
so it appears to me that the Big Mac, on the whole, is not very significant.
Maybe you are trolling, but, do you really propose that the significance of any scientific endeavor should be judged by whether or not is is copied? John Smith demonstrated a car that runs on potatoes and can be built for only $500. Still, no one has copied him so his design is not significant. Your statement does not sound very "scientific" to me. That said, There are several institutions copying the design, including several DOD projects. More importantly, you know that Virginia Tech exists, which I doubt more than 1 in 1000 Slashdotters knew before they created the Big Mac. I'd say that they are successful all around.
no applications behave like the LINPACK benchmark
Actually, few applications behave like the Linpack benchmark. But if you want to do those things, like render video or compile genetic sequences the Linpack is just fine as a benchmark. It is certainly not the be-all end-all. I think the reason for it's popularity is that it is a single number that can be easily measured. No one is interested in watching a race where they calculate the height of each person, the time in which they finished, their mass, their top speed, and their wind resistance, and try to give an accurate count as to who did the most work in the least time. Most people just want to know who got to the finish first.
Obviously, if you have job you want to get done, you will need to look at all the options for accomplishing that goal. PR should not play a big factor in your decision. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. Prior to the Virginia tech cluster, most people would never consider deploying a cluster of Apple's as a possible solution. Maybe the Linpack is just PR, and not meaningful for the majority of cases, but to my mind, it was at least PR that accomplished something useful, and challanged a number of prejudices.
Here is where I see this going. With collusion among retailers, and the ever ongoing consolidation, soon you will be profiled by every store you go in to. There will be 'saver cards," "saver clubs," "extra special saver coupons," etc. all tied to your profile. By the year 2020 expect to hear, "I'm sorry sir, your IQ is too high. We'd rather not do business with you since you could unfairly take advantage of our sales. Thank you, have a good day."
The army does, however, have remote control bots with shotguns. I remember seeing them as long ago as 1992. The EOD (Explosive Ordinance Disposal) guys use them to set off unexploded shells that they don't want to try diffusing. They were not pump shotguns, just single shot 12 gauge.
The negotiation port remains the same. You just pair traffic between hosts on any other ports that happen after a negotiation on the standard port and lump them into the BitTorrent traffic. Nobody (that I know of) does deep packet inspection on a large enough chunk of the core to get meaningful numbers.
Well, there certainly are some drawbacks to "blogs" as a news source. First and foremost, few of them have any professional journalists spending all their time searching out and writing up content. Secondly, their reputations are not as important, thus articles that have little or no credibility may still get posted (no one is worried about losing the public trust). Third, the quality of writing is, generally, much less professional and no one has copy editors read over their posts.
On the other hand, blogs have some serious advantages. Strength of numbers is one of them. No media outlet has as many eyes looking or as many fingers typing as Slashdot does. The lack of a need for credibility may allow for stories that other news sources would never run, blogs allow the readers to be the judge of a story's merit. Audience targeting, the internet allows for news to be targeted, and even custom fitted to a particular person's interests. If you really want to read about fishing, or chess, or explosives, there is a blog out there for you. Finally, blogs allow for audience participation. If you want to know more about a particular subject, or have specific knowledge of a topic, you can jump into the fray, and either learn specific things, or teach others.
Look at this article. It was not balanced, nor particularly well written, or thought out. Not many people would be interested in the article itself, but a blog discussing the article can be both meaningful, and entertaining. I don't think traditional news is going to vanish anytime soon, but the author's flippant criticism is poorly thought out. Blogs have a lot to offer.
I don't see why Bush doesn't sign the treaty. He can just ignore it like he does all our other treaties.
I often have data on my machine that I don't want others looking at, financial info, a book I'm writing that is embarrassingly bad, etc. I just stick them in encrypted disk images. It also helps me keep work and personal info separate. Typing in a password once to access each directory is not too much of an inconvenience.
I think you may be confusing willful killing with responsive aggression. The article you linked to mostly discussed the former, but it is the latter that is prevalent in a mugging type situation. When attacked or threatened people usually respond with a fight/flight response. Adrenaline and a variety of other chemicals hit you hard along with the emotions of fear, excitement, and sometimes anger. Police officers train to fire after running a few miles and doing some very quick pushups, to simulate this shaky, high energy, adrenaline filled condition. Often it is all too easy for a person to react with violence in this situation, but without experience people react quickly, but crudely. It is not uncommon for persons to engage in a gunfight at distances less than ten yards, but for both parties to miss with every shot. This even applies to experienced marksmen. Remaining calm, obtaining cover when possible, and aiming are key factors in surviving such a situation.
Will that be you walking home from the pub, or the mugger who jumps you?
I've been in a few fights, and I know how I react. I've never had an qualms about going for the gusto and reacting quickly and with as much force as possible. Partly this is a matter of training and practice. On the other hand, I have great difficulty imagining myself in an army and shooting enemy soldiers across a field. I would balk at shooting people I did not know, because someone else told me to. If forced into such a situation, I might kill to defend myself, but I would most likely just desert. Wars are the ultimate stupidity. Despite what seems to be the popular sentiment in the U.S. today, I do not believe any war is justified. I imagine sixty years ago, when ethics and morality were fundamentals many soldiers would have felt the same way.
Guns don't kill people, people *with* guns kill people
Maybe so but they make people pretty damned effective at it. As for the other choices, well, they are pretty poor
Take a look at the statistics for assault in great britain. Guns simply shift power. Instead of the biggest, strongest, most aggressive, longest armed person, survival goes to the fastest, most accurate, most cool-headed person.
As to your other points, knives are often the choice of a professional killer because they are quiet, concealable, and frightening. Bows can be fired bloody fast and guns require just as much skill to hit anything. Fists and bricks and chairs and everything else can be used to kill people, and often are. Why don't you look to why people are killing each other rather than what they are using?
California recently banned .50 caliber breech loading rifles. These rifles are very high power, long range, and effective. This will stop exactly zero crimes. Why? Because this type of gun has never been used in a violent crime in the U.S. The only crime it has been used in was vandalism (shooting signs). The reason for this is simple, people who own guns costing more than a thousand dollars, don't generally commit violent crimes. That is because violent crime is usually committed out of desperation by poor, angry, young people (usually men). I'm not stereotyping, those are the recorded statistics. Passing more laws that say people can't use things/have things/do things that enable them to break other laws don't work. If they are already desperate enough to break the law, they won't care if they are breaking two or three or four laws. That is just paperwork on how long the police can lock them up. These laws do, however, take rights away from non-criminals, important rights, like the ability to defend oneself.
I'm not sure about the reliability of these rings, but assuming that they are very reliable, having a gun that only I can fire would not bother me at all. I reduces the risk of the gun being turned on me, in a struggle. If my girlfriend wants to shoot someone after I am incapacitated, she can just use her own gun. I think that you are overestimating the chances that you will be injured/incapacitated and that someone else will need your gun to save you, compared to the risks of someone grabbing your gun and then shooting you with it. Both are pretty improbable. In any case, without some trustworthy testimony as to the reliability of these devices, it would be foolish to install one.
As far as electronic, biometric sensors go, they are a very dumb idea. I cannot imagine one reliable enough can be manufactured given our current technology. Biometrics are a bad idea as a primary means of identification, having an unchangeable key, is ridiculous from a engineering perspective, once it is compromised, you are unable to recover. All it does is provide a speedbump and a false sense of security. I foresee many innocent people will be locked up because of a foolish trust in this untrustworthy idea.
Have you ever used such a device? I have seen them advertised in the past and often wondered about their reliability. I own one of the short list of firearms they can equip with these devices, but have been unable to find anyone who has actually used one. I'm concerned that it would not be reliable enough.
I did not forget anything. I just don't see that traffic on the chunk of internet I am monitoring. Ny numbers are drastically different, showing bittorrent with only about 5%. Since the article does not give any source for their numbers, I'm inclined to believe they are wrong. I just trust my numbers over some anonymous person's since I know my methodology and sample size, and not thiers.
Am I wrong in finding that hard to believe?
I'm with you on this one. I'm watching a big chunk of the internet. My top 3 numbers are as follow:
25% http
6% gnutella
5% bittorrent
Maybe what I'm looking at is atypical, but I'm just not seeing the numbers reported. The article does not seem to list any source for its numbers.
due to the safety measures required.
Of course they are also much safer and cleaner than oil plants. For that matter, workers are 10 times more likely to suffer from radiation poisoning working in a coal fired plant as a nuclear one. No, the real difficulty with nuclear energy is portability. Gas tanks are proven technologies. Batteries still have no where near the efficiency they need to make powering larger devices (cars) practical. Nuclear reactors, are also somewhat large and cumbersome.
If I got busted for piracy, sure I'd be pissed off, but I wouldn't think it unfair, any more than I'd be annoyed at getting a traffic ticket for driving 10kph over the speed limit, it's annoying, but a fair cop.
Both of the crimes you listed are interesting in that while there is arguable, potential harm in committing them, there is no concrete harm. For example, speeding might be dangerous, and might cause an accident. Is that why speeding laws are enforced? Nope. It is purely a fund raiser for the police/country/state/reservation or whatever. The mayor of New York even acknowledged this and suggested that it was "in poor taste" to ticket off duty police officers. This instance is not a safety issue, or it would be illegal to cause an accident through recklessness, which it is.
The second crime you mention is pirating movies. Does it cause harm? The potential harm is lost sales. Not quite in the same ballpark as endangering people's lives. It is threatening the livelihoods of those in the movie industry. This is probably unethical, but I have no sympathy for an industry that relies upon draconian copyright laws for their income. The laws they have bribed our lawmakers to pass are so sickeningly unethical and unconstitutional that it makes me angry just thinking about it. Entire generations have been stripped of their literary and musical heritage, in the name of increased profit margins. I can think of few ways to intellectually bankrupt our country faster than what the media companies have done. I say, rob them blind, all you want. It does not make me feel one bit sorry for them.
I thought they rode yaks. You know the RCMYM.
Cell phones, on the other hand, are more expensive and less reliable.
Hmm, well I'll give you the reliable part, but the reason I do not have a land-line is because it was more expensive than a cell phone. That is because the monopolies, once privatized, gouge you for as much as possible without having to worry about competition. Just watch as the U.S. falls further behind in broadband, cell phone coverage, wireless internet access, power generation/distribution, and other technologies as the result of these policies. If only we citizens could band together and give politicians large amounts of money, so that they would work in our best interests.
it wasn't an outside possibility since they didn't find any evidence of genetic tampering.
Just because they did not find any evidence, does not make it so. This was probably the result of natural selection, but there is no way to determine that with certainty. It is just highly unlikely that it was modified using completely new methods. I think "outside possibility" meaning possible but highly unlikely, was a very apt description.
you'd probably want to disable some services and close some ports
There are no network services enabled by default on Mac OS X. I suppose it does not hurt to turn the firewall on, and there are plenty of minor tweaks that could be done. My point, however, is that you can just buy a mac and plug it in, without worrying too much about security. This is not the case with any windows distribution I have seen. It is true for some linux distributions I have seen.
Wolfenstein 3D was commercially ported for Mac.
Actually it was ported from the mac. And you forgot Halo, and many others. Support for games on the mac is always behind windows, but if games are your primary use for your computer, maybe a console would be more suitable (and cheaper).