Virginia High Court Wrong About IP Addresses

"Maybe I'm projecting my thoughts too much on the rest of the populance, but I know very few people my age (~30 years old) who have even started building a family, and that's quite frankly, distressing. The economy isn't everything. We will survive. The crash will happen. Let it happen swiftly and let the recovery happen in the near term."

I don't know what this has to do with the subject at hand, but I agree with you to some extent. I don't agree that it has to do with people addicted to their jobs, although there are certainly people who are. There are also people addicted to the Internet, or addicted to TV viewing or going to those bars you mentioned. If the people who promote the abandonment of religion (and that would be the majority here on Slashdot) can't find a substitute better than just sitting all day hitting refresh on your browser, I don't think there is much hope for things improving.

I'm not saying necessarily that religion is the answer (although it certainly is an answer). But I see few alternatives presenting themselves. Marx said that The State would for a while become our religion, and I don't care what anyone here [Slashdot] claims, we are going down the same path as the Soviet Union, only without a bloody revolution. Der Spiegel is today celebrating the death of capitalism and American dominance, except we haven't been practicing capitalism since the 1800s. Popular belief among American "intelligentsia" is that we now have the power to control every aspect of our society and I foresee that after the next election any failure of such control will simply engender a feeling that the controls weren't strict enough. That's what I'm seeing every day in the mainstream media.

That control, ever more sophisticated, will soon, even if it hasn't already, make anonymity impossible. The novel 1984 may have been a failure in terms of the timing, but I don't think it is far off the mark in terms of where we are going, and the direction as well as end-point to me seems fairly inevitable.